Pulse
by Meredith-Grey
Summary: It was like staring down the barrel of a gun or over the edge of some great height. The expanse is so broad yet totally singular; a cliff, a bullet, a face. Books and wit would never write the ending for her. Future Fic, Literati
1. Where Have You Been?

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _5-16-07_

**Date Finished**: _5-20-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:** _This is my first GG fic but it's not the first time I've written fanfiction before. I've been a fan of the show for a long time but I stopped watching after ASP stopped writing the series. This will be a multi-chapter story, with the first chapter's focus mainly on Rory._

**Chapter One: Where Have You Been**

1422 Broadbank Avenue was a tiny apartment in one of the limitless city blocks that made up the sprawling urban landscape of New York city. The walls in said apartment weren't exactly paper thin, but the flimsy compound of dry wall and insulation did little to console the unprotected feeling that Rory Gilmore knew all too well.

Autumn was approaching the city in the glow of orange leaves around central park and the cool breeze that would soon blow into a gust-filled winter as September rolled into the year's cooler seasons. The change itself was welcome to the young journalist; new job, new apartment, new people, new season.

Rory locked the door to her apartment behind her as she flicked on the low-watt bulb that hummed from an outdated light fixture, illuminating a somewhat organized spread of boxes filled with personal items. Ripping the clear packing tape from one of the many boxes, Rory ignored whatever long-ago marking she had left on it's side. It was one of those unvisited capsules from some love or another; just another box, another apartment, another city, another chance.

Upon first inspection she saw that it contained books, and perhaps a few other things. A leather wristband, some alternative cd's, a nearly disintegrated piece of chalk, a retro styled red dress with white polka-dots, and a ticket to a concert with the date sometime in the winter of her senior year of high school. Every book in the box had the same style cover and clean white binding, all of them authored by Ernest Hemingway. All but one, one of the books had a midnight black cover with the authors name printed in faint violet letters: Jess Mariano.

Rory sighed deeply. Checking the label, she saw that it was her "Jess Box" from years and years ago; only a few additions had been made until Rory had put the box, and Jess, out of her life.

Book in hand, Rory slid her laptop over to her across the hardwood floor. She pulled up a google search and punched in _Truncheon Publishing_, not really knowing what to expect.

Surprisingly, a header page came up with a selection of three main houses or publishing locations. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. New York? New . . . York. Rory felt a little scared and–guiltily–excited. She knew who had probably pushed New York. She knew who had the intuition, the life experience . . . she knew who was the head of the New York branch before the page had even begun to load on her high-speed internet connection.

And there it was, a picture of the New York house, which was really just an artsy storefront somewhere in the city that could have been someone's home previously, before the price of real-estate had risen to ridiculous levels. It struck her as cultured, older, cool. Rory scribbled down the address without thinking about it consciously, moving her mouse to click on the tab that stemmed from the menu bar that read: _Authors._

They were alphabetized, about thirteen names in all. Each name was a link to the authors personal page within the Truncheon website. Pausing halfway down the list, Rory clicked on Mariano, Jess and waited as it led her to a description of his book–the same book she still held in her hand–and an _About The Author_ segment.

Anxiously scrolling, the first thing Rory saw was a photograph. It had been taken by an armature color camera, but the intensity that exploded from the image couldn't be muffled by shaky hands or shitty resolution. Jess looked at her half over his shoulder, his hair rumpled and shaggy as it pointed in eight million different directions, a few pieces curling and falling into his eyes. She could see the outline of his infamous leather jacket, popped collar, crude zipper, snug on his young and proportionate body. Barely visible due to his meticulously styled hair was the faint presence of a cigarette tucked behind his ear, unlit. The scenery behind him was blurred, by accident perhaps? Well, if it was an accident then whoever had taken the picture had ended up with an attractive surprise. Jess stood as a long figure of dark intelligence. Behind him swirled a myriad of unfocused colors; none of them stood out in any noticeable form in comparison with the pictures central focus.

Blunt, smoldering, captivating, moody, extreme . . . Rory wondered if her favorite Jess-related additives accurately described how she was feeling at the moment. Inevitably, she exhaled and turned her focus to the three paragraphs or so that actually told her something about Jess that she might not already know.

Most of it was general; it wrote about where her personal Dark Horse had grown up, the places he'd lived, what he liked to read and write about, nothing Rory didn't already know at least on a impersonal, subconscious level. Just when she was about to close out the page, a few lines toward the bottom jumped out at her. In summation, it stated that Jess currently lived in New York where he ran that particular branch of Truncheon Publishing. It also listed that he was working on a new writing project that was expected to come out in the coming spring.

--

Rory went to work for her new job that week at a magazine stationed mainly in the city. The work required little travel compared to her first gig as a journalist; one that she had only been able to endure for a little over a year. The steady nine-to-five ebb and flow of her new work environment left Rory with a lot of unclaimed free time that she was unsure of adjusting to. It seemed like she hadn't had free time since before she had begun attending Chilton. It felt like nearly every moment of her life after that point–until now–had been planned but still hurried with the daunting task of getting into, and completing, college; her future always on the horizon. Even in her first year as a real reporter, Rory had practically dedicated her life to proving that she was a legitimate journalist; a positive contribution to society, an adult. But now, after she had conquered college and secured her place in the news circuit, what did she have left to strive for?

Rory brushed it off. It was ok to slow down for a year or two. There was always time to think about changing the world some other night. Just not right now, not tonight. Tonight Rory was going to do something she'd been meaning to for much too long. Setting down comfortably for one of her sadly abandoned "alone nights", Rory squished around on her couch with a stack of Ernest Hemingway perched somewhat awkwardly on her leather-topped coffee table, randomly extracting _A Farewell to Arms_ and flicking off the less-than-useable overhead light in favor of the glow of her glassy TV screen as _Almost Famous_ opened the same way it had all those years ago when she had watched in nearly four times in a row. Except, those first four times, she hadn't been alone.

--

"_I love you."_

_Nineteen-year-old Rory Gilmore stood rooted tot he spot, staring directly into the eyes of Jess Mariano as silent, wet tears streamed down her face like vats of unwilling blood from a gaping wound._

_I and you and tears . . . please, not afraid to cry, I don't–can't–won't. I . . ._

_I love you?_

She tried to hold on to his face, but the edges of her memory–her dream–were tight and fading. What was that look, that expression? Sorrow? Regret? Love, real love?

In her haze of sleep and subconscious thinking, she saw their exchange as something of much greater significance than just a confession of hidden feelings between two former sweethearts. No. Blindly, she had begun to feel the erosion of her perfect exterior. Love. A crack in her passive surface. The diamond with the hidden flaw. _Crawl beneath me, pick the scabs away, scrape the paint off . . . there's a world of horrors underneath. I am shining, metallic, disposable, a downloadable compound of expectation and spinelessness._

The dream changed, but Rory was unable to uproot the seeds of discontent from the distant garden of her mind. She remembered only his face in the morning.

--

Smoke. Billowing stacks of cancerous fumes being absorbed by the fabric of his clothes, jarring cravings through his nervous system. Jess took a deep breath as he entered the bar in an attempt to acclimate his lungs, and the burning desire to light up one of the camels he kept in his back pocket for whenever stress was getting to him. He knew things were good when the whole pack ended up in the trash from going stale.

He brushed past the bar itself and the pool tables as he made his way to a booth in the back, grateful that his uncle had chosen somewhere more outfitted for talking than picking up girls. Jess wasn't in much of a drinking mood. Sometimes alcohol had a bad effect on him so he never intentionally made an effort to get drunk. Waking up next to someone he only half remembered was never an experience he wished to relive.

"Hey," Jess greeted, sliding into a seat across from Luke. "Sorry I kept you waiting."

"It's alright, I was early anyway. Lorelai's in Hartford tonight for one of her Friday Night Dinners, so it was either that, or do inventory–"

Jess made a slight gagging sound at the mention of inventory. Luke released a half smile and continued.

"And so I decided to come see you instead." The older man finished.

"Glad to know I was so highly thought of," Jess smirked in an attempt to hide his discomfort. _Fuck it_, he slid the unopened pack out of the back pocket of his jeans while he produced a lighter from the depths of his leather jacket. He only had to flick the lighter once before a rush of nicotine subsided his senses.

Jess looked down, "Smoke was getting to me," he mumbled.

Luke shrugged, "I don't care. You're an adult now and if you want to fill your lungs with toxic fumes, then, by all means, continue to smoke your cancer sticks."

Jess smirked, his trademark crooked smile spreading across his face in amusement. As a toast he took another drag.

"And to think, I had to go through ten years of being bitched out for these things," He held up the cigarette, "and I only smoke about two or three times a month." As he spoke remnants of burnt tobacco collected in the cheap, plastic ash tray.

"So," Jess turned towards his uncle. "How's things? You know, with you and Lorelai."

He could see the faint reddening of his uncle's ears at the mention of his relationship with the long-time fixture in Luke's life that was Lorelai Gilmore. The hidden blush was his tell tale sign of embarrassment.

"Why are you so interested? I thought you didn't like her." Luke downed a swig of his Miller Light, a cheeky segue way into turning the questions around.

"I like Lorelai fine. Well, now that I don't have to serve her on a regular basis, or listen to her give me a hard time, or all of the other things that get in the way of mutual feelings of fuzziness. Besides, I like to know about what's going on in your life."

"Things are good, really good. I think this could be, uh, I think that this is 'it'." Jess watched his uncle exhale in that open it-is-what-it-is manner that he himself had adopted many times.

"'It?' You mean expensive-ring-white-dress-write-you-own-vows kind of 'it?' Wow."

Luke cracked a smile across the slightly sticky table. Jess leaned back in his seat while he crossed his arms over his chest, smirking.

"I knew it" He exclaimed in a knowing sort of way. "But, you know, this is good. I'm happy for you, really, I am. I can see you and Lorelai with each other, together." Jess tried to make sure his words sounded sincere. He'd seen his mother talk about finding 'it' many times in his life, but Jess knew that things weren't like that with Luke. Especially when Lorelai was concerned.

"Thanks Jess, I really appreciate you saying that."

"You gonna propose, or have I missed that already?"

"I did, the last time we were together. But then the whole thing with Christopher happened, and at Rory's graduation we made up and I've just been taking it slow this pat year. But I think that this time, it'll finally happen." Luke drained the rest of his beer while Jess rested his cheek on the palm of his hand.

"You have the most complicated love life, Jesus. Soon you'll be worse than Liz."

Luke shrugged off the exaggeration. "Liz is actually doing pretty well. She and T. J. have Doula now and . . . I don't know Jess, this time it seems like she's finally got it together."

"We can only hope," Jess answered a little sarcastically. The words "Liz" and "together" didn't usually part from his mouth in the same sentence, and for good reason.

Before Luke had time to reply, a dark eyed waitress with creamy skin and shapely legs, came over to their booth, ready to take orders. She looked surprisingly fresh despite the bar's somewhat rough edge.

"Can I get you another beer?" She asked, shifting her dark hair behind her shoulder. Glancing at her, Jess saw that her name was Meg off the name tag she wore pinned to her white blouse.

"Yeah, another would be fine." Luke answered.

Meg turned to Jess. He looked back up to her and saw the faintest blush creep up into her porcelain cheeks. Jess hid his smirk and gave his order. Luke rolled his eyes as Meg strode back to the bar, a curtain of dark hair separating her from the world.

"You're cruel," Luke said, shaking his head.

Jess shrugged, casting an indifferent expression over his features. "None of that was intentional."

"You know," Luke pondered, "I haven't heard you mention any of your relationships to me . . . ever."

"Huh," Jess mumbled, knowing that this would come up eventually.

"So?' He questioned.

"So what." Jess replied dryly, trying to sound uninterested.

"So have you dated much since uh, I mean, in your adult life?"

Evasive maneuvers and close saves did nothing to mask what Luke was really asking. Jess exhaled numbly, he might as well say something.

Meg came back over with their beer at this time. At which her hand brushed against Jess's fingertips while she handed him his drink. Titillated. That was the world.

The brief physical contact had thrown her, but Jess kept his cool, pretending that he didn't have an effect on her whatsoever, turning his eyes away in an attempt to preserver her dignity.

After she had gone, Jess took a swig of beer in silence as Luke glared at him across the booth, but only a little.

Laughing at his uncle's serious expression, Jess set his beer aside. "I think our friend Meg over there answered your question."

"Jess," Luke said in a warning tone.

He held up his hand in surrender. "Ok, jeez. Yeah, I have dated since Rory. It's ok for you to talk about her, I'm not gonna have a stroke or whatever. But I'm not saying any more at the present time."

"Could you be any more vague?" Luke asked. "Dating could mean any number of things . . . c'mon, you've got to give me something to work with here."

Jess fingered the outer edge of his Samuel Adams, thinking. "I had this sort of on-again-off-again thing with this girl Leaha for about a year-and-a-half. But, you know, we both had to work a lot because neither one of us had anything, but we sort of ended it mutually before I moved back to New York. I don't know, we both pretty much knew that it wasn't 'it', to paraphrase your earlier speech."

He could tell that Luke was a little surprised. But, hell, what had he expected? Spending years in self-inflicted pinning was not his thing. However, working himself to the point of exhaustion so he'd have no time to think about it, or her, sounded more like Jess.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?' He could hear the curiosity in Luke's voice.

Shrugging, Jess thought about his answer for a second. "It's not that easy to explain. It's just, whenever I saw you things were always tense. Besides, with Leaha, it was like I was never sure about things. I'd never been in a relationship where I didn't know how I felt about the other person." He shrugged again. "Whatever. Doesn't really matter."

There was a long silence after that and both men were at a loss; not for words in particular, but with the dynamics of them both being there and both secretly missing the other. But things were different now and there was a trust between them that hadn't been there before. A very small part of both of them feared what that meant, but the larger part instigated its existence, took pride in it.

"What's the real reason for this. Here, tonight." The silence was broken by Jess; who knew, instinctively, that Luke had asked all these questions for a unrevealed purpose. He was setting up a foundation, getting a feel for things as he prepared for the impact of something. Though, what that something was Jess couldn't say.

Luke took his nephew's honest question and decided to give him an honest answer.

"Rory's living here, in New York. And, I don't know, Jess . . . she's not with that guy anymore and she doesn't know a single person in this huge city full of millions of people, except you."

The older man sighed; not because he was tired or disappointed, but because he knew the effect that his words were going to have, for better or for worse.

"I'm not telling you to go see her, or to ignore her. I just thought I'd let you know that she's here."

Jess didn't say anything. What would there be to say in the first place? How was he supposed to feel? He knew how he _did_ feel. What was he supposed to gain from knowing this, from coming here and listening to small talk and then having this–_this_–dropped on him, tearing away at everything . . . at his everything. What cold he want now, now that he knew things would start rotating beyond his control and his rage and his sadness and his bitter regret—his want, his need—what did he need? Jess knew what he needed, and it wasn't Rory Gilmore. He couldn't stand the thought of seeing her and feeling nothing. The day he lost his connection with Rory was the day he gave up on all of it. It was no exaggeration, and Jess knew it. Sensationalism and Self-Destruction were ranked very closely together for him; even the vague idea that the great love of his life could really be finished, really over—that alone would kill him.

For Jess, dying, figuratively, meant hating. The day that his compassion for Rory was obscured by his bitterness and anger and jealousy was the day she'd die to him. And because of this, and his fear that she would one day hate him the way he couldn't–refused–to hate her, Jess was unable to find the desire to seek her out, to invite his own ruin.

Staying away was easy. In the distance he lost all close feelings. In the past it was impossible, unthinkable, the concept of hating her for what they had done to each other. He couldn't, he damn refused, to hate her; because a very small, unwavering part of him still loved her, just a little bit. It was that love, that unfading, unrelenting, miserable love that made everything ok. It was blind, and with it came all the disadvantages of not knowing where to look next. But it was real, and it was all he had.

"Promise me that you won't . . . " Jess was shaken out of his musings by the sound of Luke's voice as he trailed off.

"That I won't?" He waited for his uncle to finish.

"You know what I mean," Luke replied seriously. Jess merely nodded.

"I'm not going to go find her, at least not tonight anyways. If I choose to see her I'll wait until I have a reason." Internally, Luke knew that Jess was telling the truth. But he had to give his warning anyway, for himself more so than Jess.

"Here," Luke slid a scrap of paper across the cherry wood table. It was an address, and home plus cell phone numbers. Jess didn't have to ask, he already knew who they belonged to.

He slid the paper into his pocket without a word. Only allowing himself a quick glance, three seconds tops. But three seconds was all Jess needed to memorize the numbers and the order they came in, what they signified.

The two men left shortly after that. Paying for their drinks and giving a surprisingly less-than-awkward goodbye, Jess and Luke parted. Jess, opting to walk the four or so blocks back to Truncheon and his apartment on the third floor; while Luke drove out of New York and back to Stars Hollow. Back to the life that Jess had worked so hard to escape.

--

**A/N:** _Reviews, my life elixir? You decide._


	2. I Saw You Dreaming

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:**_ R_

**Date Started:** _5-20-07_

**Date finished: **_6-5-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer: **_I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:** _I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed my first chapter, I've never gotten such an enthusiastic response for the beginning of a story. But I think it's only fair to tell you guys that these first few chapters aren't my personal favorites; in my opinion, the story actually picks up around chapter four. Currently, I have up to chapter nine hand-written, but I get a very limited amount of time to work on my stories on the computer, so that explains the slow update. Try to forgive me, if you can. Here's the second installment._

**Chapter Two: I Saw You Dreaming**

Rory Gilmore groaned involuntarily into the disarray of couch cushions she found herself buried under. Sunlight poured into her living room through the set of locked glass doors that led to a small balcony overlooking the avenue, it's rays a clear and yellow, a welcome calm compared to her previous evening. Her dreams had been filled with her own prescription of painful weakness. Jess's eyes trained to her face in albatrossious disappointment. _How could I have been so stupid?_

If it had been any other city on any other morning Rory would have put the dream out of her mind and chalked it up to nostalgia, or loneliness. But, today, as the sunlight was shining like a heavy-lidded iris of enlightenment with the assortment of blankets and pillows beneath her feeling like a gently sloshing raft, she wanted him there with her. The raw naturality of the morning brought his face to the surface of her memory, unblemished by her own guilt and self-denial. His defined jaw, artfully set cheekbones, his mouth twisted to one side in a crooked expression of sarcasm.

The image was undeniably salient, course against her serrated heart, maddeningly precise in detail

It was uncanny how her mind conjured up such images. The thin line of his lips, the hardened gleam of his eyes. The Death Of _Her_ Jess.

Sighing, Rory wiped the sleep from her eyes and padded into her bedroom, pausing in front of the closet as she contemplated what to wear. _What happened to all of my clothes?_ Rory wondered vaguely. It was all unpacked, every last box had finally been emptied due to her recent quantity of free time and obsessive organizational skills. Where were her normal clothes? Not the designer tagged outfits that Emily and Logan had provided for her, but the real Rory clothes; denim jackets with suede skirts and funky boots, matching hats and scarves. What had happened to her converse tennis shoes and her gloves with the ends worn off?

Gone. Real Rory had all but disappeared. In wardrobe at least. Everything she owned was intended for a life she no longer led. Yale clothes, her DAR outfits, even her up-and-coming reporter sets; but nothing for Rory Gilmore the first-time staff-writer for a New York magazine. That's when it struck her; she had no clothes to fit her new life in New York.

What was it that some designer had once said? You are what you wear?

At this stage, she supposed it really didn't count for much.

Frowning, she threw on a nondescript black, tweed skirt and a fitted wine-colored sweater. Rory slid into the bathroom in her shoe-less feet, her tights making the tile slick underneath her. Pausing in front of the mirror that also doubled as a medicine cabinet, she ran a brush through her disheveled hair. Rory was past the bangs phase, thank God, but currently there wasn't another phase to take its abandoned position.

She threw her hair up sloppily into a bun, not bothering to put much effort into the actual execution, knowing that it was just going to get rumpled and frazzled when she tried on fifty-million different sets of clothes. While she brushed her teeth she decided to pick up coffee and a bagel on her way to make a hair appointment before she went hunting for a new wardrobe.

Hiding a smile, she giggled in that quintessentially girlie way when she thought about how _cool_ this was. She was shopping in New York for a whole new look. And, hell, maybe a new life, too.

--

Rory sat somewhat nervously in one of the adjustable swivel chairs as her hair was scrutinized by a young stylist.

"Have you ever considered coloring your hair a little darker?" The young girl reached over to the gray-topped counter to grab some color samples that hung from a loose metal chain.

"No," Rory replied politely as the hairdresser played with her hair. "I'd look way too Morticia Adams."

The girl shook her head. "It all depends on the hairstyle, and makeup."

"I was thinking about keeping the length but getting a few layer towards the front, you know, but still long enough to pull back."

"That would really compliment your face. I wouldn't curl it though, not with layers. The Farrah Fawcett look wouldn't do you justice. Straight is your best bet, with a headband or a clip if you like styling your hair."

Rory ended up agreeing with nearly everything that her hairdresser had suggested; going for long layers but opting to stay her natural hair color. After all, natural had yet to fail her.

"So," the other woman started as she wet Rory's hair in the sink, preparing to cut her layers. "Do you live here in New York?"

"Yeah, I just moved here a couple of weeks ago, but I grew up in Connecticut so I'm sort of familiar with the city."

"Connecticut's a cook place, my aunt lives out there. Visited her a couple of times, a few of the people I met out there were a bit eccentric, nice though."

"You have no idea," Rory said, amused.

"Why did you decide to leave? I would have loved to grow up out of the city."

"Growing up there was great, I wouldn't trade my childhood in Stars Hollow for anything, but I'm a journalist so . . . had to leave sometime, right?"

"I've always been interested in journalism," she said conversationally as Rory remembered that her name was Cat. "But it seems like a pretty competitive field. You know? You either have it or you don't. I don't know if I'd be able to handle someone telling me I didn't have talent." Cat explained in a heart-felt way while Rory remained politely silent for a moment, bitterly remembering the incident in which she'd heard those words spoken to her over two years ago.

"I guess that comes along with every job, no matter what you do." Rory replied somewhat evasively. "Like, when you cut hair, not every client is going to like it."

But Rory did like it. Cat helped her with the flat iron and the headband, showing her how to brush her hair with least resistance and how it should be aligned with the way it grew. She left the store with a growing pearl of confidence hidden deep in her chest, glowing as she made some daring clothing choices that would have made even Lorelai blush.

_What's going on with you, Rory? What's happening with you?_

His words floated back to her, but this time she felt her pearl shimmer with self-assurance. This was the Rory she had always wanted to be; condiment, independent, and–dare she say it–even a little adventurous.

What you don't yet know you can turn into anything.

--

_He thinks her wrists are the most beautiful things he's ever seen. Their out of the reach of his lips, which have been set to work on the delicate, salty flesh of her neck, so he pounds into her harder, curiosity driving him to see how long she'll hold out. How long they can keep this up. This rhythm._

_It's all in the way she's arching her back, face distorted in concentration, beads of sweat clinging to her hairline._

_He had waited six years for this._

_Waited six years for her hands braced against the headboard and for hot kisses on her neck and her lips and her breasts. Waited for the slick feeling of her wrapped around him; the sound of his name on her lips, drawn out and full of heat and sex. Waited for the feeling of her body beneath his, her hips moving in synch with his own, her legs around his waist._

_She is his–for the first time in a life dominated by first times. The first time she admitted what she wanted, the first time she left home, the first time she had sex, the first time she disappointed her mother, the first time she allowed herself to be wowed by expensive gifts and important people, the first time she committed a felony, the first time she dropped out of school, the first time she was the screw-up, the first time she went back to school, the first time things still didn't make sense._

_But this, this will go on to become more than just another first time. It trumps all time, all notions, all plans, everything she thought she knew. Because–for the first time–she doesn't have to think to know what she wants. Him._

_His fingers are in her mouth and around her nipple, hands lifting her upupup until it's clamp and scream; screaming his name, _Jess_, always wanted it to be him doing this to her–with her–on top of her._

_Happiness is wanting exactly what we have._

Jess Mariano sat straight up in bed, breathless, his sheets contorted around his body like some sort of cocoon, or straightjacket.

"Assfuck," he swore tensely, tossing the bed things off his keyed up body. _Yeah, just what I fuckin' need._

The dark face of the clock on his cluttered nightstand told him it was a little past three in the morning. Stumbling into the bathroom, Jess turned the handle on the tap for cold water. Rubbing his bleary eyes as he let it full up the sink, he dunked his entire head in the ice-cold water for a few seconds before he came up to breath in shallow gasps, his face dripping wet in the moonlight. Dripping with guilt that was only intensified by the slow pulse-like pounding of his head.

Wrong. That was so fucking wrong. Jess knew who that girl had been, his subconscious manifestation of his life's imperfection. The minds way of letting him see what was missing in his life. But the sensations, the physical act itself, none of that belonged with her. The feelings and the experience didn't go tagged on with his memories of Rory Gilmore; they came from a different woman at a different time in his life.

It was uncanny, what his mind could do. The long buried feeling of incompletion in his life, translated into the one outcome that he had plausible reasons to bitterly reenact. Love. Long abated. Twisted. Warped. Imagined. The Death of _his_ Rory.

But it was wrong to think of her, of Rory, in such a demoralized way. A misrepresentation. It was exploitation of her memory, even if it was on a subconscious level.

He contemplated the option of taking a cold shower; it twas just the thing he needed to clean his mind. But it was late, and Jess could feel the drowsy protests of his exhausted body pulling him back to bed. Dully, he concentrated on steadying his breathing as the sink began to empty out.

_Go back to bed, Mariano. You can beat yourself up in the morning._

--

Cold silver light filled the low hanging sky like slow filtering tap water. He'd gotten up at five, oddly refreshed but distantly moody. The sky had gradually changed from a deep indigo to a pearly gray as he lit up his second cigarette in the past week, not bothering too look too deeply into the situation for his own benefit. He put on a pot of coffee to give him a morning jump-start and slipped into a pair of black-washed jeans. Shoving crap around in his closet, Jess shivered slightly while he hunted for a T-shirt to insulate his bare chest.

He slid into his boots soundlessly, tucking his jeans in along the way, letting his cigarette hang off his lower lip while he fastened the zippers and buttons that went along with said boots. Jess paused to take a drag, breathing in long and slow as the nicotine shot through his nervous system straight to his bran. He stubbed his fag out in the chipped soap dish that he used as an ashtray. Some feeling. Jess stood nearly motionless as he stared at the slowly dissolving curls of smoke that so matched the grayest morning of his life. Shake out of it, surly boy, last night is dead to you now.

Last night . . . his dream . . .

It wasn't the actual content of the dream that made him feel like one of those wax-paper-blue-faced junkies who moped around the park, eyes hollowed by dope and nothingness. No. It was more like the implied _idea_. The idea of feeling Rory, with him, them together. It was the kind of thing that made his hands twitch involuntarily when he reached for his lighter. Made his head throb when he thought about the curve of her hips. Made him growl like a feral dog when he swung away at Nick's punching bag on wet Saturday afternoons in an attempt to steam-out the heat behind his dissatisfaction.

This wasn't like him. Years ago he had an unbroken devotion to her, but every time they drew close to one another their feelings would crack. Not always in half, and very rarely would the break away in neat sections that one could calculate. But more often than not, Jess would feel a little less complete after every encounter. All that remained now, after so many years of knowing each other and never coming together the right way at the right time, it had left him with the last piece, the last fragment, hidden away from shallow arguments and surface feelings. By being away he was able to separate himself from her. Dreams like the one he'd had last night had become increasingly uncommon.

He stopped thinking about her a long time ago. It wasn't a conscious decision. He didn't wake up one day and decide that he didn't love her anymore, or that he was done with trying to deal with it. No. Very gradually, she began to slip out of his mind and back into his past. Rory Gilmore ceased to exist as real person, more like a memory. Something revisited less and less as the years rolled by, the pain of their relationship slowly numbed by time and distance.

But on that lifeless gray morning Jess Mariano dove headfirst into his pain and his memories. Digging into the unorganized drawer of his nightstand, he found the slightly crumpled scrap of paper. Jess used it only to double-check his own memory. Yes: 415-7289.

Throwing on a thin gray hoodie with a skinny cut, pinstriped blazer for an extra layer, Jess formulated his resolve into a determined choice. He was going to give a call to a bittersweet memory.

--

The translucent haze from earlier that morning had blown itself out by later that afternoon. Rory had gone home the night before to look over her clothes just one more time before she called her mom back in Stars Hollow. Her conversation with Lorelai had been somewhat one-sided; Rory listened attentively as her mother filled her in on all the things that were going on without her back at home.

But the idea of Stars Hollow as her home was beginning to feel a little incomprehensible. Rory didn't–couldn't–see any way for her to live and work in the charming Connecticut town that had been her land of firsts.

Rory thought of all theses things as she absentmindedly walked down one of the limitless streets of New York, her eyes casually flicking over the sloping faces of the slightly older buildings she'd wandered towards, exploring the crowded streets of Manhattan.

She hadn't planned on finding it, hadn't planned on seeing a mop of dark hair separate from the crowd of people flooding the New York streets, hadn't planned on finding herself dead in front of Truncheon Books, and she definitely hadn't planned on freezing while he looked up from whatever he'd been staring at and saw her barely eight feet away. Crowds were shoving past them and through them, the great wave of people sloshing between the buildings that served as marmalade canyon walls.

She couldn't move, and even if she could Rory had no rational idea as to what she would do—or say. It was like staring down the barrel of a gun or over the edge of some great height. The expanse was so broad yet totally singular; a cliff, a bullet, a face.

His face.

His hands shook with his breathing, each contraction of his lungs, each push of blood beneath his skin–it was all nullified when his vision came to focus on the girl who had made an appearance in his dreams the night before. This was irony. No. This was Rory. The _real_ Rory, not the Emily-Gilmore-fucking-cardboard-cut-out that he'd seen on his last trip back home, or the hardened vengeful girl of twenty-one who had made an appearance in Philly. But there she was, really was, the Rory who had always hidden behind blushing and manners. Her hair long and shining, her rosebud mouth a perfect O–the last gleam of her azure eyes as she turned and ran in the opposite direction.

_Fuck._

She'd been standing there, watching him watch her, nervous as hell, but still there. And now he could barely glimpse her retreating back amid the faceless populace. Should he run after her? No. Jess was a fighter not a runner, physically anyway, the cigarette pretty much sealed that deal. Besides, he didn't have to chase after her, there were other ways of contacting people besides face-to-face combat.

--

The sequence of numbers appeared like a symbolic representation of right or wrong. His mind was speeding, traveling fast on the high of possibility. It was time to let things go, to surrender the reins. After so many years Jess was tired of running and fighting and killing himself for the things he wanted. Running could mean chasing or going away, fighting was the sharp lurches and jabs that he had to dodge just to keep going, just so he could keep hating himself and hating his situation and not knowing how to love anything at all but knowing that he loved her.

Her.

It was her phone number that was challenging him now, forming the not-so-simple question that he had been asking himself since he was seventeen: _How am I going to handle this?_

He felt his hand move from its place deep inside his pant pocket to the slightly raised buttons of his cell phone. Whether any memories or expectations flashed through his mind, Jess didn't know. His knuckles were white with tension, eyes darting around the subtle truth that stood before him. The moment was close, close enough to absolve their past miseries or further prove all the fears he'd held away from his thinking mind_. _

Jess leaned his head against an unfilled bookshelf, the silence of his bookstore somehow comfortingly solemn. A call to his past; in the emptiness he felt like a mutated version of his younger self.

"Hello?'

"Why are you afraid to see me?" He didn't bother making any other introduction. She knew who it was.

Stupid. Assfucking stupid. What the hell was that? Why couldn't he have at least given a polite greeting? Or told her that _she_ was the one being stupid. But then she would have hung up on him, and he couldn't handle another missed opportunity, not today of all days.

Silence. She was probably in her apartment by now, making a mental pro/con list and weighing the outcomes in a variety of scenarios. Damn Rory and her rationality.

"I'm not afraid." Defensive.

"Then why'd you run away when you saw me? You knew I'd be there."

"I could ask you the same thing."

"Fine. Then ask it. But we both know the answer to that already, why waste time."

"Why did you call me?"

"Why'd you run away?"

"How did you get my cell number?"

"How did you know where I work?"

The silence fired like bullets, killing them both.

"I thought I'd be able to see you, maybe even talk to you, ask you how your business is going. But I couldn't."

Jess sighted, "Why?"

He could practically hear her fidgeting on the other end of the line. "I just remembered the last time I saw you. How I'd hurt you, again. I felt stupid."

A cold surge of long-dead anger threatened to soak his insides. Jess forced it down.

"I know the feeling."

Almost as if she had just realized it, Rory gave a sharp intake of breath. Yes, she knew what he was saying.

"Oh, Jess. I'm so sorry."

_Breath._ Just. Remember. To. Keep. Breathing.

"Don't be."

There was a pause, not as long or painful as the first.

"I had a dream about you the other night." His eyes snapped open. Was she stealing the words from his mind?

"What'd you dream?" Jess asked softly, his question almost suffocated in his throat.

He knew that about now she was probably biting her lip, thinking about what she was going to say. Was it terrible that–after five years–he still knew what she looked like while she talked? It was painful, if nothing else.

"I don't really remember what it was about. You probably think it's really creepy. Or pathetic. You know, the woman who dreams about the boyfriend she had in high school . . . "

"Well, take comfort in the face that you aren't the only one who's had dreams recently." Jess alluded.

"Do I want to even ask what it was about?" She laughed through her watery eyes, curling up on her unmade bed.

He chuckled. "It wasn't exactly rated G, if you know what I mean. I was actually going to call you later today, and then I saw you . . . it was like I'd found myself in some sort of Dickens alternate-ending."

"I found your box."

"What?"

"Well, it's my box, actually. But it's full of your things. It's my Jess box."

Jess cleared his throat. "Hey, uh, Rory."

"Yes."

He decided to ask her quickly, a more time efficient way to get his point across. "Was it a conscious thing, running away like that? Did you do it to get back at me?"

"No." Her voice was hard, assured. "It was an accident. Really. I went for a walk and I guess I just had the address in my head or something, whatever the reason, I ended up there. I wouldn't do that to you."

Somehow that made him feel even more rotten. "I know."

Why did he get to be so goddam understanding? So adult, so _mature_. She felt slightly sick. "How can you say that? How can you listen to anything I'm telling you and not hate me for it? I bolted today, I practically went looking for you–" She cut herself short, breaking off.

Jess's mouth had formed a hard line. His voice was heard by Rory with sharp awareness that did nothing to inspire any emotion in his even monotone. "I didn't hate you. I never have. When I saw you in Philadelphia I was, disappointed. A little disappointed in you, but mostly in how things had worked out for you."

"Things _didn't_ work out for me. I'm alone now, I don't even have a lousy boyfriend to cheat on me like last time."

He repressed the urge to snort. "Don't worry to much over it. You'll find someone, Rory." It was the first time he'd spoken her name throughout their entire conversation. She took notice.

There was a bit of a wordless void in which Rory collected herself enough to respond.

"No. These will all just go on my growing list of bad decisions. It's actually funny, really. When I started Yale everyone thought things were going to be wonderful and that I was going to be someone, you know? Like I was really ready and ok and I knew what to do, like I knew." She laughed at herself in a closed-mouth sort of way. Jess held his gaze, dark and steady, against the freshly painted emerald green wall.

"And what didn't you know? That it was going to be hard? That perfection is impossible? Tell me about your mistakes. Get me in a chatty mood and maybe I'll share a few of mine."

She unzipped her boots, still lifelessly sprawled on her bed, and chucked each one across the room individually. Where to begin?

_Get comfortable,_ she thought sarcastically, _this is going to take a while._

--

**A/N:** _I wrote this chapter months ago so I had to go back and change quite a bit. I'm not sure if I like it better than the first chapter, but I'd love to hear what you guys have to say. Feedback is always appreciated._


	3. Say Anything

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:**_ R_

**Date Started: **_6-14-07_

**Date Finished: **_6-25-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer:**_ I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:** _Back for round three. Midterms have kept me occupied but I'm hoping that this chapter can make up for the long wait._

**Chapter Three: Say Anything**

He waited while she talked. Her words coming to her in a sort of newly found calm that she hadn't had at the beginning of their conversation. Sometime he would interrupt her to ask how something had felt or what she was thinking. He made no assumptions, letting her explain away the lost few years of her life. The Empty Years.

"It was a mistake, all of it. Almost every decision that I made was made for the wrong reasons."

"You were trying to become someone else, someone who didn't care about the things that had happened to you in the past."

"No. It was like I was trying to retaliate or something, like it was all just a way to get back at you or get back at my mother or my grandparents. I didn't want to admit any of this while it was happening, but it basically all started when I slept with Dean. I was using him and he never even realized it." She sighed heavily into the phone. "Whatever. It doesn't matter. I used him, he used me. Sex makes people so manipulative."

"Did you know he was using you? I mean, while it was still happening."

The line was quiet for a moment as Rory contemplated her answer. "Yes and no. In the back of my mind I knew that we didn't really love each other, I'd known that all along. But I was so proud, and so stupid. I wouldn't take my mothers advice, and she was right about everything. I was the other woman. But the whole thing was wrong and I knew it. After it happened, after he had left, all I could do was sit on my front porch and cry. It was wrong, everything had gone wrong, and all I could think was that it wasn't supposed to be him. I had never wanted it to be with him. Not with Dean. Not like that."

She sounded tired, like she had just jogged six years instead of six blocks, with a broken heel.

Her next few words were hardly heard, her voice pained and small. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be, I'm not. I have no reason to be upset with you."

"It was supposed to be you, Jess. I had planned on it being you, even my mom was ok with the possibility of us, if we had ever chosen to . . . "

His disbelief was evident. "You talked to Lorelai about, about us and–"

"Yes."

"When?"

"After she'd gone out of town one weekend and you and I were still dating."

"And she was just like, 'ok, use a rubber' or whatever? She didn't try to kill me–or secretly _plot_ to kill me?"

Rory gave a muffled laugh. "She just wanted me to tell her before it happened." She explained.

"Yeah," his voice was a little strained, his dream flashing before his eyes if only briefly. "I know."

"So, eh, when did, um, when did you, damn. Please stop me if this is too personal."

Jess released a slight chuckle, Rory could hear him smirking on the other end of the phone. "It's ok. I get it, I know about what happened to you, so now you can hear what happened to me."

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, really. I don't want you to feel obligated. It's ok if you don't want to tell me about your prior, er, history."

"If I didn't want you to know don't you think I would have tried to evade that subject a little more tactfully? It's ok. Besides," He said, amusement ringing in his voice., "It's not every day that a guy gets to swap stories about virginity with his ex-girlfriend."

His joke had lightened the mood, giving Rory the opportunity to release a bubble of nervous tension through laughter. "Alright then, where to begin?"

He sighed, running a hand through his hair as he let his full weight rest against the empty bookshelf. "It was before I'd met you, obviously, when I lived in New York for the first time. I was pretty young then, maybe even too young. Whatever. Anyways, I was around fifteen, and I basically just wanted to get it over with."

"And," Rory asked, feeling a little bit of heat in her cheeks. "The girl . . . "

"She was a friend of mine, same age, feeling weighted down by her V card just like me." He laughed now, and Rory bit her knuckle so she wouldn't groan, or giggle. "If it means anything, I didn't just decide to do it with her on a whim. We talked about it before hand."

"Was she your girlfriend?"

"No. We were just friends, and we never hooked up again after our first encounter, or whatever you want to call it, but nothing after that. We'd made an agreement about the whole thing." Jess calmly explained.

"I wouldn't be able to do that," Rory confessed. "I mean, don't most girls want to give their virginity to 'the one' or whoever? My grandmother tried to get me to understand that once; she told me that if I 'gave myself' to the wrong guy that I'd end up giving the right guy a sweater or something to make up for it."

Jess really did laugh at that. "Well, I sure hope it's a damn nice sweater that you've been giving your other possible 'destined ones', wouldn't want them to be disappointed."

"Stop that," she huffed, "I can practically hear you smirking."

"Don't you even want to know her name? I know you, Rory, you're curious." He teased.

"Yeah, ok. I sort of wouldn't mind knowing just a little bit more . . . "

"Her name was Jaid, mouthy with reddish hair, brown eyes, and the inside connections to get us a room with a stolen credit card–and not get caught."

"Like in _Home Alone_?"

"Yes. Except it damn well wasn't the plaza. I only did bad things for fun back then. We used to steal things just to steal, take lots of sharpies and write 'obscene phrases' in public places where lots of people would read them. I remember this one time we threw eggs at the bitchy nuns who used to smack kids with the complete Oxford English Dictionary in Sunday school. Kid stuff, mostly. But we didn't really hang out too much after that, not for every long anyway."

"Too awkward?" Rory tried.

"No. We just . . . I stopped doing kid stuff, and sort of started messing around with real stuff. I didn't make her hang around where she didn't belong. Jaid was one of those special girls who went to private school with parents who had real jobs and morals and all other kind of crazy things I just didn't understand. I let her keep her life, even if she was dissatisfied with it. I kept her out of trouble."

"What do you mean by 'dissatisfied'?"

"The simple fact that she wanted a life like mine made it very clear that she wasn't ready to be thrown head-first into it. She didn't know what she was getting into." He said wisely.

"Don't go all Nirvana-esque on me here. A life like yours? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means that sometimes I didn't have to steal just for fun, but so I'd have food to eat. It means that sometimes staying out of my house for three-day stints of time was a better alternative then staying home. It means that sometimes I'd have to crawl back home anyway to make sure Liz hadn't starved or passed out or let herself get beat up too bad. It means that sometimes our problems are more real than we're willing to admit." He stated matter-of-factly.

She recoiled slightly while he gave his little speech. Rory remained silent, her mind reeling with the flood of new information. Jess had just told her more about himself in the last fifteen minutes then he had in all the years she'd know him. She was finally getting answers to some of the questions that had been on her mind since she was seventeen. She knew straight away that he was different. His machinery had been reworked, tinkered with by someone else's tools and know-how. A part of her was a little disappointed that she hadn't been the one to run the maintenance checks, to inspect and guide him though the rough patches that he seemed to know so much about. But curiosity was not a wasted emotion on Rory Gilmore; despite her disappointment, she still wanted to ponder over him again, to know some kind of satisfaction when all the parts slipped smoothly into place. He was still the same Jess, just with less potential breakdown capacity and more impressive credentials.

_How did this happen?_

A heavy silence was soon to follow, leaving them both feeling exposed and somewhat over-talked.

"Ah, Rory . . . "

"Yeah?"

"Maybe we should quit while we're ahead."

_He means before we have a chance to fight_. "Maybe that's a good idea." She agreed, swiping her fair index finger across the cool hardwood floor in repetitive circles. She didn't know what to do with her hands, they just kept shuddering and sliding around in a nervous mess of fingers, like a moth pinned under a drinking glass.

"Will I see you again?" Jess asked girlishly.

"Yes, maybe. I don't know. Call me, calling is good, it's . . . yeah, just call."

"Ok. When are you good? I can give you some time if you want."

"After five, usually I'm leaving work around that time."

"Expect to hear from me."

He rang off.

_No goodbye_, Rory mused, _typical._

--

Barbra Streisand kept Rory company as she adjusted the volume on the television and then wandered back into the kitchen where she was assembling lasagna. _Way to make the most of a Sunday night, _she chided, sniffling a little. Her recent phone conversation, although somewhat welcome, had thrown her more than she wanted to admit.

Luckily, Rory didn't have much time to dwell on it because just as she slipped the pasta into the oven to bake, her cell phone gave a soft _ping_ to signal a call from her mother. Grateful for the distraction, Rory answered it quickly.

"Hey mom."

"Hey sweets! How's life in the Big Apple?"

"Oh, things are good," she forced, trying to convince herself almost as much as she was trying to convince Lorelai.

"Yeah, my parents missed you on Friday, I missed you too. It was me and _only me_ last week, I couldn't even con Luke into going with me."

Grateful for the distracting small talk, Rory wiped at her eyes quickly before speaking. "Why couldn't Luke go?"

Lorelai hesitated for a moment. "He went to New York to visit someone."

"Really," Rory commented conversationally, trying to hide the fact that she probably already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask. "Who'd he go to see? He could have stopped by."

"Ah, I think that he went to see Jess." Lorelai was trying to make her voice sound casual but Rory cold tell that it was strained. It wasn't that Lorelai didn't like Jess, to be perfectly honest, she had no particular opinion on the Jess situation, she just never knew where Rory stood on the matter.

"Oh." Rory didn't know whether to tell her mother about what had just occurred between Jess and herself; it was still fresh and new and she didn't know how she felt about it. But, Lorelai had answered her question honestly, maybe sharing her news with someone else would make the situation less complicated.

"I talked to him." She blurted out.

"Who? Jess? You talked to Jess?" Lorelai guiltily tried to hide her surprise at her daughters little confession.

"Um, yeah. We talked on the phone about twenty minutes ago."

"Well that's . . . "

"Sudden. Random."

"Among many other additives 'sudden' and 'random' are probably two of the most appropriate words to describe the situation. What gives?"

"Well," Rory sighed. "I did kind of a stupid thing."

"What kind of stupid thing did you do, sweets? I mean, is this an oh-your-lips-caught-my-fall thing, or is this a wake-up-in-the-morning-oh-my-god-what-have-I-done? kind of thing? Because if it's a–"

"Mom_,_" Rory said tiredly, chiding her rambling mother. "Not that kind of stupid. You can breath between words again, everything's alright. Besides, we were on the _phone_, remember?"

"Ok, jeez. Just tell me what happened."

"I was walking around this afternoon and I'd looked on the internet a few days before to see if Truncheon had a location in New York–"

"Wait," Lorelai interrupted, "what's Truncheon?"

"Oh," Rory continued, "that's right, I never told you about that. It's the publishing house that Jess works for. Anyway, when I looked on their page I saw that they did have a location in New York along with the one in Philadelphia that I went to a couple years ago. And apparently Jess runs the place in New York, and they had a picture and lots of stuff about the books they put out–"

"Get to the interesting part, I'm fading."

"Ok! Jeez, so I was walking around in the area where the bookstore is and I walked past it or in front of it or whatever, partly because I was curious and partly . . . anyway, so I'm standing there and just as I look up I see Jess walking towards me. He didn't see me at first, there was a fifteen second window where I could have looked away or hidden or something but I just stood there, and when he saw me he stopped walking and we both just stood there and–"

Lorelai held her breath on the other end of the phone.

"–I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach, or like I was underwater or something. Then I made one of those crazy, panicked decisions that always turn out to be really stupid. I ran away_,_ can you believe that?"

The silence on Lorelai's end came to an abrupt end. "You ran away, wait, why?"

"That's just it, I don't know. It makes no sense, none at all. I think 'breathless' would be the right word to describe the whole not-breathing thing that happened, but it wasn't like a butterflies-in-you-stomach-romantic kind of thing. When I ran away my face was burning and I just felt so . . . so horribly ashamed."

"Rory, as fascinated as I am here with the blow by blow interpretation, you're still leaving out key details. Did he follow you? Why did you look up stuff about Jess on the internet? And why the hell would you have any reason to feel ashamed for just standing in the street?"

"No, he didn't follow me. I looked him up because I wanted to see if he had written another book. And the ashamed part I suppose I never got around to telling you that story, either."

"Oh, what story? Jesus Christ, I should have put you in the CIA training program with your mysterious talents for a double life. Why are there so many Jess-related stories that I'm currently unaware of? What else do I not know about, huh? Did you guys secretly sneak away and get married in Vegas–get divorced tow hours later–and sneak back into your normal lives? I don't even think I know you anymore!" She said in mock outrage.

"Don't worry mom, I'm not about to take on a position in the cold war. Besides, I'd never be able to do it, I'm a terrible liar, and I tell you everything."

"Apparently not," Lorelai exclaimed. "But I'm more than willing to look past that as long as you fill me in now as opposed to never."

"Where did I leave off?" Rory wondered out loud.

"Ashamed," Lorelai supplied, eager for the scoop. "You were going to tell me why you felt ashamed."

"Oh, that, yeah. I mentioned the publishing house in Philadelphia, right?'

"Yes," the older Gilmore replied.

"Well, the semester where I wasn't at Yale Jess came to see me. It was in that span of time where we weren't–"

"Taking," Lorelai finished.

"Yeah. Jess came and he told me about the book he'd written and it was such an amazing thing and I was so proud of him. I mean, he'd actually done something. He had proved everyone wrong and he had done everything on his own. We decided to meet up again the next day before he had to leave, just to have dinner and catch up and, I don't know, hang out or something. But Logan ended up driving up right as we were about to leave–"

"Oh, I bet that was interesting."

"–and he basically invited himself to go along with me and Jess–"

"Deja vu, huh?"

"–and Logan was acting like the biggest jerk. He was being a complete asshole and Jess left–which I don't blame him for, I ended up leaving too–and I went out to go talk to him."

"And what? C'om on, I'm dying here! Lungs collapsing, heart exploding, brain melting–"

"He basically asked me what the hell I was doing and why I dropped out of Yale and what possessed me to stop talking to you and he kept saying 'this isn't you, Rory. What's going on with you.' I didn't have any answers for him."

" . . . wow."

"That's not all," Rory said soberly. "I went back in the restaurant and had a huge fight with Logan. Seeing all the things that Jess had done when no one thought he'd turn out to be anything . . . I realized that I had become something other than myself. I came home the day after that. I was sick of not knowing what I wanted to do, and I guess the idea of giving up the things I loved just because one guy didn't like me seemed really stupid compared to a whole lives worth of people who told Jess that he wouldn't become anything. It woke me up."

"How does that have to do with–"

"–not done yet! That was all back story for the back story of the story that I haven't finished telling you. Be patient, young grasshopper." Rory warned as she took her lasagna out of the oven.

"Of course, master of covert operations," Lorelai retorted darkly.

"Moving on. Later, after I had gone back to Yale, Jess sent me an invitation to an open house that his publishing house was having, and Logan was in Costa Rica and we had been fighting again anyways and so I thought 'why not?' So I went."

"Oh!" Lorelai interjected. "That's the thing that Luke went to with April."

"I know, I saw both of them there. But I didn't just go there to see where Jess worked, I went to Philadelphia so I could cheat on Logan, with Jess."

"Oh, Rory." Lorelai cooed over the phone line. "Please tell me–forget it. Just, just tell me what happened." She pinched the space on her nose that began near her eyes in an attempt to absolve her headache.

"I didn't. I'd never be able to forgive myself if I had. But I almost did! That's the shameful part, and I didn't even tell Jess that I was still with Logan until we were kissing and I pulled away and–" Rory stopped talking for a moment. "Mom, what I did was awful, it was so unfair to Jess. When I got there he had asked me if everything was fixed and, like an idiot, I said yes. But I ended up telling him about Logan cheating on me and I just couldn't do that to him. He didn't deserve that. And the worst part of all was when I left I was a complete moron and I said that it was a mistake of me coming there and I still loved Logan . . . "

Lorelai felt like her jaw would never reconnect with the rest of her mouth, her shock and speechlessness plainly evident. She was a broken record. "Oh, Rory."

" . . . and I hadn't seen him since then, not until today."

Quickly attempting to recover, Rory was grateful when her mother found her voice once again. "What did he say? After you said all those things about being sorry, and Logan, and everything else? He must have said something."

Rory took another moment to quiet herself again. "He said that he wasn't sorry I had come. I think the phrase he used was 'it is what it is' or something to that effect. I felt so awful after that. It was completely unjustified. I mean, he wakes me up from my stupid thing I was going through and that's how I show my gratitude? By throwing the word love in his face? I left after that."

In her sparse kitchen, all alone on the freezing emptiness that is New York, Rory Gilmore hung her head as she relived her former disasters.

"Mom," Rory said into the mouthpiece. "Please don't be mad at me. Trust me, I know that what I did was the absolute definition of wrong."

"I'm not mad, I'm just processing. This is a lot to take in all at once. I'm just surprised that Jess took all of that as well as he did. I mean, the Jess I remember would have, I'm not exactly sure what he would have done, but 'it is what it is' sure as hell isn't it."

"He's changed, mom. I'm serious, he's still Jess, but he's the Jess we always hoped he'd be. It's like . . . I don't know, it's like he can finally handle being himself. He couldn't do that before; everything was guarded and evasive and he was never able to tell me when things were bothering him. But today, on the phone, he told me more about himself in a matter of hours than he has in years."

In the background Rory could hear another voice with Lorelai. She held the phone down for a second so she could shoo the other person away.

"Sorry, Luke just got in."

"Oh, don't ignore Luke on my account. You go and do . . . whatever it is that you always do on Sunday evenings."

"Are you kidding? After what you just told me I'm never getting off the phone with you again. You'll have to give me updates every three minutes so I can keep up with your double life that you've been hiding from mommy."

"If you keep calling my encounters with Jess a double life then I'm going to be reduced to giving you only five minutes updates instead of three."

"You jest? I was dead serious about those three minute updates. I mean, Jesus! Rory, this whole thing is huge, why did you wait so long to tell me?"

Rory heard a faintly muffled "what's huge?" and a less-than-quiet "tell you in a minute."

She sighed. "It's just, I never know when I'm going to see him again, and I never know how to bring him up in conversation. How random would that be? 'Hey, did I every ell you about the time when I drove three hours so I could cheat on my boyfriend with my ex-boyfriend who left me three times who happens to be a published author?' That would definitely come out weird."

"I see your point," Lorelai said dully. "Just, next time you feel the need to go all Jason Bourne with your love life could you at least mention if it involves our favorite version of James Dean?" She pleaded.

"I'll try," Rory admitted wearily.

"You know, I don't think that whole three-minute-update thing is going to work. Because now I've taken in so much information that my brain is jammed with distant remembrances of a once-upon-a-time happy couple complete with hair jell and that pink lip-gloss you used to wear. Too. Much. Can't. Think."

"In my defense, I have no idea what you just said," Rory replied, her face animated with a bemused expression.

"You still like him, don't you!" Lorelai hissed into the phone bravely. "Admit it, we would not be having this conversation if you didn't."

"Mom!" Rory exclaimed as she dug into the dish of lasagna that had lain cooling on the stovetop. "Stop saying that! Someone might here you."

"Someone already did. And did you or did you not just completely ignore my last accusation? Because I'm thinking that you did–"

Mortified, Rory's eyes grew to the size of eggs. "Oh my God, Luke!"

"What about him?" Lorelai questioned casually.

"You are a sneaky woman, do you know that? Luke is standing right there and he can probably hear every word we're both saying! Oh my God, what if Luke told Jess about this conversation? I mean, not intentionally of course, but sometimes he can say things without realizing it and–this is all your fault. Yeah, you with your _teasing_." Rory shoved a fork full of hearty lasagna into her mouth, chewing aggressively with a frown on her face.

"Never fear agent Gilmore, your secrets are safe with me. But you better call me if anything else happens."

"Hold on, I haven't even finished telling you about today yet." Rory said in between mouthfuls.

"Well hurry up, you're taking forever," Lorelai responded impatiently.

Rory cleared her thought. "Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, I ran away, right. So I ran back to my apartment, well, I didn't technically run the whole way, but you know what I mean, and so three minutes after I get there he called my phone and we talked for the better part of two hours."

"Could you be any less specific?"

Rory sidestepped the urge to fire a sarcastic reply. "We made plans to talk on the phone again, or we have each other the option of talking on the phone. Something like that," she mused, hitting the mute button on her remote while _The Way We Were_ flashed across her television screen in a recorded sequence of images.

Lorelai held the phone down for a second while she said something to Luke. Rory curled up on her sofa with her plate of lasagna resting on the coffee table.

"Sorry about that," Lorelai apologized. "But someone here is trying to pry into top secret files, terrorist." She muttered.

Giggling, Rory thought it best to break off the conversation for tonight. "Go tease Luke with your new-found inside information. I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?"

"Sounds good. But give me an update if anything comes up. Love you."

"Love you, too."

The line clicked off shortly after that, leaving a semi-stunned Lorelai stationed at her kitchen table while Luke bustled around the seldom-used stove and cook-top. Sighing, she let her head fall to rest on her folded arms, remaining motionless for all of five minutes before Luke caved and sank down at the table across from Lorelai.

"Talk."

"About what?" She huffed.

Luke leaned back in his char. "What did Rory say that upset you, it was something she said, wasn't it. You're upset, you look upset, and you look like it's something you can't talk to her about–which can't be good."

"When did you become such a conversationalist?" She sat up and brushed a few of her dark curls away from her face.

"Stop being evasive."

She fingered the frayed edge of a _Home and Garden_ magazine that lay open in front of her, holding her eyes down but deciding to break the silence.

Sighing again, she looked across the table at Luke. "Where should I begin? At the part where Rory has been keeping things from me, or the part where she tried to cheat on her boyfriend and didn't tell me or the part where she never told me why she decided to go back to Yale, or the part where she only told me any of those things is because another thing happened today and her guard was down because she was upset and she wasn't going to tell me." Lorelai's voice had continued to grow in volume throughout her little speech. She paused for a second to take a breath. "What does that mean, Luke?" Her tone was soft, wondering where she had gone wrong.

--

**A/N:** _Lots of dialogue in this chapter, but chapter four has more past experiences and philosophical prose. Reviews make my hands type faster._ _–hint hint–_


	4. Snow White in the Enchanted Forrest

**Title**:_ Pulse_

**Rating**: _R_

**Date Started: **_6-26-07_

**Date Finished:**_ 7-6-07_

**Summary:**_ He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer:**_ I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_Thanks so much for all the wonderful reviews and encouragement. I'm trying to get this chapter up sooner than usual because I'm anticipating some computer problems in the next few weeks; these aren't long-term issues (at least I don't think) because I should be purchasing a new computer sometime around December. (Hopefully.) I have an author recommendation for you guys, check out Chuck Palahniuk (i.e., Invisible Monsters, Fight Club, Diary, and Stranger Than Fiction, etc.) He's my current favorite author._

**Chapter Four: Snow White in the Enchanted Forrest**

He had since gotten used to it. Sometimes it took longer than usual but tonight it took only a matter of minutes for the air, heavy with ice and fumes and disease, to cut through his outer senses like shredded ribbons; penetrating the slightly softened exterior as he froze up, his wall solidifying in the cold atop the buildings third story roof. He remembered when he used to feel this way all the time, cut off and frozen, like warmth and intimacy belonged to the ones with no hang-ups. Circumstance had made him who he was. Was. The past tense. Not how he was now. This, this feeling, this wasn't him anymore.

But it used to be.

Five years. That's how long ago it had been. He looked at all he had done in that amount of time, all he'd been able to change.

And what was change, really? For Jess it meant making a conscious decision, it meant abandonment and neglect and everything he'd dealt with at fifteen and sixteen, and later, too. Change meant wanting something that he didn't deserve–and giving it up. It meant realizing that he was good enough, it meant learning to know himself–his whole self–even the parts that no one should have to know. The experiences that no one deserved to have, especially him.

He remembered leaving for the final time; feeling a mixture of anger and love and loss and expectance and sorrow, but more important than any of its predecessors was the feeling of clarity. Everything made sense for one blinding, unforgettable second as Jess walked away from Rory and her oppression, a refusal ringing in his nineteen-year-old ears.

Then sadness came, not for himself, but for the girl he had so cruelly cut out of his life. She would never know what he was feeling right now–the feeling of unbound freedom and knowledge, made more potent with the realization of _who he really was_. In that one second he saw his life and his actions and what they meant with a sense of calm; that's when things had started to change.

That's when he made his decision. To never screw up like he had so many times in the past, to stop hurting himself in order to hurt those around him, to do what he wanted to do without feeling guilty about who he was, to accept that–yes, things were fucked up–but he could change them. That was the exact moment when he stopped hating himself, when he stopped letting his hatred control his life, when he was able to think and process clearly for the first time in years.

It didn't matter that the world thought he was nothing. He knew that he was what he was, and that required no expiation.

_This is existing_; bands of landscape rolled past his window into the infant hours of the morning. It was then that his thoughts came unabated and complete, with intelligence and the kind of purpose that he had never been acquainted with. When you have nothing to loose and everything to gain taking a chance doesn't feel as problematic as it would under normal circumstances. It became very apparent to Jess that he could have and do whatever he wanted without that sinking feeling of guilt that he had so grown used to in the past three years. When he relied on just his intellect his life stretches out behind him like a linear series of experiences, the roadmap to Success.

That was the day he first started writing.

He'd driven to New York in a rush, eager to get back to where he could walk and think through its streets just before dawn. It was times like that, in the mauve-turned-lavender glow of sleeplessness and great possibility, when he could walk until forever and feel infinite. He had himself, and he had the steady ebb and flow of minutes ticking and opportunities to be created. Things had worked out in some form or another–even he had worked and fought against what he undoubtedly deserved, but that was ok. Things were ok. He was going to be fine, everything was just fucking fine.

--

The first time Jess met Leaha it was a fluke. He had just gotten back from his mothers wedding and he didn't see himself going back to Stars Hollow any time soon. In fact, he didn't see himself going much of anywhere any time soon, outside of New York, and the idea of having a car around was becoming continually less practical as the days went on. So he found himself in a semi-creepy section of Brooklyn, pulling into a inconspicuous, unmarked garage that was known among those worth knowing to be one of the shadier chop shops in the area. Shady it most definitely was, but this was where Jess knew he'd make the most off his cheaply bought car, so–dignity aside–that's where he was going.

The place was run by a thirty-something Puerto Rican by the name of Anthony Figurera. The guy stood at a solid five feet four inches, one of the only full grown men Jess had ever met shorter than himself. But he had a full-on beard with shoulders like a linebacker, so Anthony made up for his height in more masculine areas.

It was eight-thirty on a smoky night in June, a week after his moment of clarity–as he was referring to it, he had laughed about it shortly afterward–and Anthony had agreed to check out his car with the possibility of a deal. If it had been anyone else Jess would have told them to cut the bullshit, he wasn't in the business of deals and possibilities, but Anthony owed him in a way that he knew how to work with. If worse came to worse, Jess would pull the you-owe-me-a-favor bit, but he could think of much better ways to go about getting cash out of Anthony, so hopefully he wouldn't have to work on his Godfather impression.

"Lock the door behind you, we're trying to be discrete tonight." Anthony led Jess into the back portion of the garage, passing shelves of parts, drawers of tools, and stacks of tires. The grease-blackened floor was just filthy enough to blend in with the toes of Jess's boots; he vaguely toyed with the realization that if the police were ever after him this would be the ideal place to hide.

"So where's the head?" Jess pulled out a chair at a fairly clean metal-topped table that was hidden by the maze of automotive paraphernalia.

Anthony opened a crude refrigerator door, extracting two beers and taking a seat in one of the mismatched chairs. "She'll come bursting in any minute now, maybe she won't be roughed up too bad this time." The older man was slumped over in his char, his face in a half shadow as evening crept around the corners and under the doorways, the florescent lights over head did little to penetrate the murky oil slick of a garage.

"'She' who?" He let the question stand alone, using the edge of the table as leverage to send the cap of his beer bottle flying. Jess caught it with his free hand before it could collide loudly with the tabletop.

The older man opened his mouth to answer, but just then both men straightened up–visibly tensing–as they heard the sound of a door opening and being quickly slammed shut. The sounds of many locks being drawn followed shortly afterward, at which Jess focused his gaze on the figure that had just appeared in the small opening between stacks of tires.

The room ran with silence for a moment, a pregnant beat of time that held Jess's attention more than he was willing to admit. What was this? This low, almost painful, burning tremor that sped from the back of his throat down his neck, spine, and lower back? This tightening in his stomach, the ripple of aggression pooling across his lap and settling between his legs?

It finally ended, not particularly by choice, when Anthony blinked his heavy Hispanic eyes and mumbled, "Sit."

She obliged, directing her dark eyes downward, letting a soft-looking ebony wave fall across her ivory shoulder. Her hands looked oddly masculine as she brushed her hair behind the gentle slope of her shoulder; pale spiders hardened with use, grown waxy and muscled over time. If you looked at her face you saw a young girl, haughty and perhaps even cynical, but young. If you looked at her hands you saw mud and wire and the course surface of sandpaper.

Her face read Prossy, but her hands screamed Hit man.

Jess knew better.

"He tried to knife me." The girl spoke with a disdainful, almost bitter edge to her words. Jess knew that edge, it was _his_ edge.

Anthony didn't even pretend to look surprised. "I told you not to go alone, Ricky would have gone with you if you had waited until later. Don't look at me like that. You had a deal to make, that's fine. But, next time, don't act stupid. Don't go out alone. Wouldn't want to hurt that pretty face of yours." The last sentence was spoken with a bit more warmth, and Jess saw that Anthony was only giving her a hard time out of real care for her well being.

She reached a hand around her torso, leaning away from the back of the wooden chair to pull out a rubber-bound cache of bills. Jess tried not to shudder too visibly as he heard the snap of elastic as her bra worked back into place.

She slid the money over to Anthony, who, unfazed, tore off the rubber band and flicked through the cash like a dealer. His tanned fingers, stubby as they were, moved with speed and diligence.

He looked up after counting the cash twice, and pocketing it, to look back and forth between Jess and the girl.

"Have you two met before?"

Jess shock his head, he then took a swig of beer that had sat untouched for too long.

"Let me introduce you. Jess, this is Leaha; she works as a delivery runner for me. Leaha, this is Jess; he's and old friend of mine who's here to do some business, if we ever get around to it."

Leaha turned toward him from the adjacent section of the square table. She held out one of her lethal hands for him to shake, he accepted the gesture much against his better judgment.

He got the feeling again, except this time it was faster, spreading from the sensitive pads of his fingertips all the way down his spine and back up to his brain. He wanted to groan, or growl. Jess settled with a polite "nice to meet you" instead.

In the far away distance, a phone rang.

Anthony swore.

"Goddam it, he was supposed to call two fucking hours ago . . . " He trailed off into a unintelligible jumble of obscenities as he dashed back into the maze of car-related junk in search of the phone.

Jess turned back to Leaha.

"Where'd he send you?"

"One of the projects, a few blocks from here. Creepy place, the guy nailed rats to his door." She recoiled a little just thinking about it, her husky voice disgusted and somewhat rattled.

Jess looked at her for a hard moment, recognizing the half-scared-half-angry look that she held in her wide, round eyes. "Anthony was right, it really isn't safe for you to go out by yourself. Crazies love girls like you."

Leaha wrapped her arms around herself. "It's stifling. I'd be able to do so much more if I wasn't molested every time I walked down the street." She chided, moving her hands to rest on the tabletop. She looked back up at Jess and he was able to get a good look at her eyes for the first time. They weren't black like he had first thought, but a shade of deeply intense forest green. "So," she attempted to make small talk. "What do you do?"

"I'm a messenger, basically the same deal as you. Except I know all the anti-molester shortcuts." He smirked. Her eyes glowed darkly, inky pools of liquid green.

He leaned in towards her, "You know, it would help if you wore sleeves when you went on deliveries. I've found that customers respond best when they're not ah," Jess flicked his gold-speckled eyes down towards Leaha's exposed arms and collarbone, selecting his words expertly, "distracted." He finished, attempting to bite back yet another smirk, but failing miserably.

The corners of Leaha's rosebud mouth almost turned up to form a smile. "Why do you think Anthony does so much business? The delivery service is part of the sale. I distract the consumer from the ridiculous price they pay."

Jess laughed softly. "Sure it doesn't just confuse some people? You'd think that you were delivering a lifetime subscription to _Playboy_ or something."

Anthony chose that moment to storm back into their line of vision, all pleasantness he'd displayed before eradicated by his frustrating phone call. Maybe this would make the deal come through faster; Jess could only hope as much.

He dragged the chair out loudly, letting its wooden legs scrape against the blackened concrete. 'Here's the deal," Jess had hoped right. "I'll give you thirty-five grand for the car–"

Anthony's words sped up at the look of disapproval that crossed Jess's face.

"–_and_, I'll throw in that apartment I was telling you about over in the East Village. Exactly the kind of place you'd dig, good sized place, lots of windows, pre WW II but recently renovated, _clean_, with at least three different book stores within walking distance. You wouldn't have to pay a dime apart from upkeep and all that crap . . . you know the deal. I don't want you living with that creep–what's his name?–Tulane, anymore! You hear me?"

Jess leaned back in his char for a moment, pretending to think. Really, he was watching the facial expressions of the two people before him; Anthony looked expectant–maybe even a little anxious–while Leaha held her gaze downward like none of this was any of her business, but Jess could see the brilliant green of her eyes as she looked up at him through her dark lashes. He blinked, and turned back towards the still waiting Latino across the table.

"Are you sure it's three bookstores? You've counted and everything?" He couldn't help the smirk that danced across his features while Anthony glowered at him in an exasperated fashion.

"If I wasn't so tired," the older man deadpanned, "I'd smack you."

Leaha surprised both men by making a small noise that they had all heard before, but it wasn't the type of sound that one expected to hear from the Midnight Queen herself: she laughed.

"Well I guess it's good that verbal contact with the outside world tires you to the point of collapse. When can I get my cash?"

Anthony scratched the back of his head, wrinkling his forehead. "I'll have Leaha bring it around when you get settled. Just give me a call."

The pair continued to talk while Leaha watched from the sidelines like a mother observing her children bicker amongst themselves.

By the end of the evening Anthony had filled Jess in with a more detailed description of the apartment, explaining that it was fully furnished and some-what historical, but not exactly old enough to meet the cut-off. Their conversation was cut short when Anthony's phone rang just as they were saying goodbyes; he dashed off to answer it, leaving Jess and Leaha alone for the second time.

She turned her green eyes on him, meeting his chestnut gaze with one equally intense. "So, should I be wearing a chastity belt when I bring your cash around?"

They were standing near the door to the garage, almost completely swallowed by the darkness, eyes glittering like reflectors on a desolate road. He let his line of vision sweep over her body, his bold side more prevalent in the dark wash of evening. Jess cocked his head to the side," Pretend you're delivering a lifetime subscription, like they used to do during Vietnam. Bet those guys would have loved a good distraction." He turned to go, letting his hand rest on the door handle.

"See you around, Caroline."

Leaha arched a darkly feminine eyebrow. "I know you didn't just compare me to a prostitute." She kept her tone playful, biting her crimson lower lip as Jess's smirk forced her to look away, crossing her arms over her chest protectively.

He laughed softly. "Just think of me as Inspector Abberline to your Mary Kelly."

"I'm sure Heather Graham will be pleased," she muttered as Jess gave one last could-be smile before departing.

Leaha wandered back to Anthony's office, beyond the nich of habitable space hidden within the garage, through the oak doorway where her boss could be seen grumbling into the receiver of a telephone. She collapsed on the worm loveseat that Anthony had kept in his office since she could remember, closing her eyes while her legs dangled off it's end, leather boots casually hung in the air.

Anthony slammed the phone down, cutting off the sound of a whiny customer. He reclined in his squeaky office chair, throwing his feet up on the desk for balance.

"Why'd you stick around so long?" He asked lazily, chewing on the cap of one of his identical penmates.

Leaha sank deeper into the couch cushions, hiding her face with a rippled curtain of black hair.

"You could have taken off, " he stopped talking as Leaha's boots bounced together oddly, a nervous shudder traveling through her legs.

Anthony thrust the pen down on the desk. "What are you on about, been acting weird every since—oh."

She remained motionless. Anthony sighed, rubbing his temples in the process.

"Would it be too literal if I told you not to screw with Jess Mariano?"

In response to his dry tone, Leaha opened her eyes, angling her face so that Anthony could only see one of them.

"Well," Anthony muttered. "If you don't come back after delivering that cash at least I'll know who you're with."

--

"And by that look on your face I can see that Jess has told you none of this." Lorelai finished.

"Ah, wow, that's . . . " Luke trailed off.

"Complicated?" She quipped.

"And they talked on the phone? They had an actual conversation? Together?"

"Yep, this afternoon."

Luke's eyes began to grow more circular by the second, widening in realization. "This is my fault!"

"What?" Lorelai asked incredulously. "I don't see how any of the things I've told you in the last conversation have anything to do with a mistake made by you or myself. Well, with the exception of being so surprised. "

Luke leaned forward, "I gave Jess Rory's cell number. I thought it'd be a good idea at the time because Rory doesn't know anyone around New York yet. I don't know what I was thinking." He shook his head while Lorelai sighed disapprovingly.

"Don't blame yourself for that. Look, if Jess really wanted to find Rory do you think he would have let something like an unknown cell number stand in his way?" She asked rhetorically.

He shook his head.

"Luke," she took his hand across the surface of the kitchen table. "Knowing Rory the way that I do, and knowing how she gets whenever Jess is involved, it's pretty safe to say that things like this were bound, are still bound, to happen."

"Whether they want to tell us or not," Luke finished darkly. Lorelai frowned.

"Yeah," she mumbled. "I guess you're right."

--

Twilight swam like caramelized sugar in an absinthe glass: sluggish and so bitter it was almost sweet. Leaha was the piercing green flame, burning through the city like lamplight as the day drained away, down the sewer lines, black like rabbit holes. She thought about the substantial wad of money hidden in various places on her person; she had to stay serious, at least for a little bit. It was a lot of cash, almost too much cash, but once it was squared away the fun could begin. Maybe she'd have enough time to stay over and play.

The door to apartment thirty-seven C was firmly locked, but alive somehow, guiding her down the dingy hallway towards its engraved surface. Green paint had been slopped up everywhere, even between the shallow cracks of military-esque carvings on the woodwork's hardened face. She raised one of her alabaster hands to its marred surface and knocked.

Leaha could hear the distant sounds of movement inside, locks being opened. She shifted her weight from one boot to the other nervously, the only sign of her discomfort.

Jess's figure appeared in the doorframe, leaning casually against the framework in an attempt to look nonchalant.

"Does this count as one of the anti-molester shortcuts?" Leaha asked, her expression leaving room for questions.

"Depends," he crossed his arms over his chest, pulling his violently red T-shirt tight across his shoulders, making him look fashionably skinny. "I don't remember filling out a life-time subscription, but the outfit leaves little to wonder . . ." She rolled her eyes at his quip about her attire. Ignoring Jess's smirk, Leaha brushed his hip with her own as she breezed past him into the apartment with Jess close behind, shutting the door with a definite snap.

"You find the place ok?" Jess came over to where Leaha was waiting just inside the main living area where he had used crates to create makeshift bookshelves. He had a set of them stacked against the crimson walls; volumes placed two and three rows deep. They'd been shoved in various places about the apartment, some still in boxes, others organized beneath the surprisingly efficient windows. The surprising part was that there was no draft, not that there were windows.

She looked around the apartment, her forest green eyes drinking in its layered expanse of literature that Jess had used as a buffer. Where there would have been photographs or a television there were books. Leaha nodded in response to his previous question, turning to face him, a warm almost contented feeling spreading throughout her body, making her limbs heavy and weak.

"I've got your cash," Leaha couldn't meet his eyes, so she focused on a point just above his shoulder instead. Her eyes began to dart around the room again. "It's just, wow, you've got so many books . . . it's amazing." She did look up at the last part, and the drunk feeling intensified when he looked back at her with an affectionate expression, a slight glow creeping into his cheeks but not enough to count as a blush.

"I read a lot, in case you couldn't tell." He wasn't sarcastic and guarded, as his demeanor would suggest, more in the way of quiet, intelligent. The faint beginnings of a smile lurking behind his haughty exterior. "Do you read much?" He moved to stand in front of one of his junk-crafted bookcases. Leaha followed.

"I love reading but it takes me forever to read a book." She brushed her oddly strong fingers over the spines he kept on display. "See, I do this thing where instead of reading a book straight through I stop after almost every page and draw."

She blushed at the interested and somewhat confused expression that Jess wore, but her embarrassment burnt out quickly as she continued with an explanation. "I draw the things the author talks about on each page, usually I fill up an entire sketchbook with drawings from one book. Sometimes it takes me months to get through a novel."

"Will I ever get to see some of those?" Jess leaned his narrow hips against the bookshelves, straining the sinews of his arms as he crossed them over his chest in the lightless ending glow that was dusk. The window across the rooms functioning interior was large and uncovered, providing an almost stereotypical view of New York Nothing: gray, industrial, faceless; but along with the darkness came its charming ability to mask all things ugly.

The silence was thick, but not with awkwardness as Leaha had feared. She felt the inexplicable pull of Jess's chocolate brown eyes, daring her to look into them.

She stared down. "I should give you that money."

Leaha moved from the living room and his unexplained magnetism that excited and terrified her at the same pointed instant, to the kitchen, where she would feel like she was under some form of surveillance with all the little digital clocks and shinny faces watching her. Jess followed, his eyes a little darker and the thin pink line of his mouth a little cruder than before, but still observant to her expressions and movements.

She threw her jacket on the back of one of Jess's mismatched kitchen chairs, holding her long hair out of the way as she reached up the back of her shirt to feel around for the thick band of cloth that bulged with currency. Leaha placed it on the table, moving on to another wad of bills attached to her inner thigh by a cuff she wore just bellow her underwear. More money to add to the growing pile on the table. Lastly, after straightening the front panel of her black skirt, she sat down at the one of the chairs surrounding his secondhand table so she could remove one of her boots. There was another roll of cash pressed up against her calf.

"You're lucky,' she said, lacing her boot back up. "You're my last delivery for today. If you'd been second or third on my list I would have pulled that cash out of some less hygienically appareling places." She cast him a quick glance through her thick ebony lashes; green eyes soft and maybe even a little playful.

Jess, she could tell, was enjoying her general nervousness. He let her ramble on about some deliveries she'd made earlier on that day, barely able to contain a superior chuckle at her blatant self-consciousness. He took a few steps closer to her, his gaze never wavering.

"Leaha," he said evenly as she stood from the chair. "Look at me."

She silenced herself mid sentence, perhaps even mid word, inching closer towards him all the while until they were standing flush against each other. Being three or four inches taller, Jess looked down at her soft face and petal-like mouth.

He kissed her in the doorway to adulthood, the money forgotten on the table.

--

The last cigarette slipped from his fingers, plummeting the three or so stories from the rooftop to the pavement. Jess shivered, from shock almost as much as cold. Maybe it was from the sudden shift in air and environment; it didn't take much for Jess to know that he wasn't alone. At least not anymore.

Nick stood next to him, untouching, supportive, golden. He was the positive to Jess's negative, the obvious statement, the undeniable sincerity. Nick was, for Jess, the unintentionally blunt comedic relief, the entertainingly obvious, and, at times, the unquestioning listener.

Wordlessly, Jess rose from his spot at the buildings ledge where he had spent an incalculable amount of time that evening with his thoughts and his cigarettes. The pair retreated back to the considerably warmer confines of Truncheon Publishing, leaving an unbroken silence to stretch out between them until Nick–being the observant and mood-aware man that he was–sat down in one of his secondhand living room chairs near his silent friend, waiting for answers.

The lights will always fade in and out, the minute's tick by whether he spend them with care or foolishness, and for the first time in more than a long time, Jess Mariano wanted to talk.

--

**A/N: **_All of the interaction between Jess and Leaha is set in the past. It's just Jess remembering, not a factor in the current plot. I hope you guys got all the references, but if you didn't just mention it in a review and I'll be happy to explain. Comments are greatly appreciated._


	5. The Beginning

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating**:_ R_

**Date Started: **_7-10-07_

**Date finished**: _7-24-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**: _I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_This is actually my shortest chapter to date, but nearly all the chapters that follow are around normal length. I was actually wondering if anyone would be interested if I wrote a Season 3-time line story. Most of you guys seem to like the Future Literati but let me know if you'd be interested in something else._

**Chapter Five: The Beginning**

Beginnings were always the most difficult part, Jess figured, because no matter how much you imagine something, or analyze it, the things you dream up never compare to the initial vibration of newness, the sharp douse of sensation, the shock of confrontation and reality. How do you relive something like that? That feeling of blind, terrifyingly insecure contact over and over–generated by something that refuses to simply settle into the dusty crosshairs of memory?

Three windows, each with four separate panes of glass, all of it divided by peeling wood-painted molding. Twelve points of vulnerability in one wall; every wood surface scared and unsuccessfully masked with faded pigments applied in liquid form. The molding, the coffee table, the chair back, the door; it became an exercise of visual musical chairs. His brown eyes flicking from one battle worn object to another while the hum and sting of Nick's movements sealed the song of Jess's fruitless distraction.

Abruptly, he realized that the hum and sting he'd heard earlier were more than just the flutterings of air and thoughts around his clouded mind, it was the sound of Nick's voice, talking to him.

The sofa on which he was seated was dark and soft, like freshly brushed hair or showers with the lights turned off.

" . . . shouldn't smoke a whole pack like that, best to pace yourself. You look freaked, man, what's eating at you?"

Jess looked up and blinked a few times, suddenly coherent. He raked a long fingered hand through his mane of wild ebony hair, not really caring that it already stood on end. "Hey Nick," Jess turned towards his friend while wearing a thoughtful expression. "Have you ever been in love?"

Nick squinted his eyes in contemplation, as if the answer to Jess's question was hidden within the decor of the young man's apartment. "No, I don't think so. Not really."

"What about that Devon girl? Did you love her?" Jess leaned further back into Nick's tawny ultra-suede sofa, stretching out his legs in front of him in a relaxed position reminiscent of a great cat.

Nick shook his head. "It didn't feel like love, you know, however they say it's supposed to feel. What's with the jilted thing man, you thinking about Leaha?"

"No. Not Leaha. Just . . . thinking, I guess. See, this girl I know from way back, I talked to her today, saw her, actually."

"Weird?" Nick let his golden hair hang in his face as he busied himself with making drinks.

"Not exactly the word I was going for, but it wasn't what you'd classify as normal, by any means." Jess replied collectedly.

Nick handed Jess a drink (screwdriver, Five Alive and Everclear mix) and collapsed on one of the unoccupied couch cushions next to Jess. "Awkward?" Nick raised a knowing yellow eyebrow.

"Not so much, or as bad as if could have been. I suppose you could say that it went pretty smoothly considering the circumstances."

"And what circumstances would those be? You still haven't given me the details on this girl; was she a friend, third cousin, girlfriend, indentured servant?" He quipped, drinking deeply from his Jack and Coke.

"Ex-girlfriend."

"What's her name?"

"Rory."

"When'd you date?"

"When I was like, seventeen, eighteen, around then. We were sort of friends before that."

"Still sort of friends?"

"Yes. I think so, I don't know." He shook his head. "This is stupid."

"Not true," Nick protested. "This should be good for you, Jessie boy. You're entirely too secretive."

"Call me that again and I won't wake you up the next time you vomit in your sleep. Besides, I prefer the term 'intensely private,'" Jess defended.

Nick scoffed. "If you let me die in my sleep then my memory will outlive yours. Knowing you, you're not going to kick it until you're practically ninety-five, and by then you'll have lost all your friends and family and any last scrap of creativity you ever claimed to have. And I will have tragically died in my prime of alcohol poisoning, my memory living on–a legend!"

Jess sorted. "You're cracked."

"And you're the one all moody and depressed over your ex-girlfriend from High School."

"_Moody?_ You think this is my version of moody?" Jess laughed, an intelligent smirk dancing across his angular features.

Nick stared into his now empty drink. "Angst man, you need to move past the angst." He chided.

"And this is coming from the man who listens to My Chemical Romance."

Nick nearly choked on an ice cube. "I do not." He countered.

"Liar," Jess said darkly. "These walls are thin, buddy, the next time you bust out The Black Parade make sure I'm not home, or in a coma, if at all possible."

"Shut up," Nick grumbled. Jess snickered.

"Are you _defending_ anything closely related to Gerard Way? Do my ears deceive me?" Nick glared at Jess over the rim of his now empty glass, playfully annoyed at his friends mock outrage.

"And this coming from the man who owns a Holy Wood T-shirt." Nick deadpanned, still staring at Jess unbrokenly.

Jess sat up a little straighter than his earlier relaxed stance. "Hey, do not even attempt to compare Marilyn Manson to a twisted emo version of a boy band." He whipped out another pack of cigarettes and paused before lighting one to down the rest of his drink.

The pair spent the remainder of the evening discussing the merits of noted music artists, branching off to an hour-long debate that covered such broad subjects as The Clash, Atreyu, and Cat Power.

Nick could only sigh in somewhat uncertain relief when he saw that his friend now looked more like a properly functioning human being verses the model of James Dean two point oh that he'd found on the rooftop earlier that evening. Instances such as the one experienced prior to their music related banter had grown steadily uncommon. Nick only knew bits and pieces of Jess's past, but he had managed to wrangle together enough of the fragmented stories that Jess had shared with him to get a glimpse of who his friend had once been–and what he had gone through. But there were times when Nick would catch a very brief sighting of the hidden Jess; when he was deep in thought or when he was relatively alone with no one to watch the way his expressions took off with his mind–those moments–those were the instances in which the charismatic, devilishly alluring man that Nick had come to befriend would lapse into a darker, more self conscious version of himself; appearing younger and considerably less happy by comparison.

He had spent more than enough time wondering who had done that to him, and now, after so much worried contemplation, the truth came out.

Jess Mariano was a man with a painful past, and the one who had put the screws to him was none other than a girl from a distant memory. Rory, Nick mused, Rory, Rory, Rory; he swore to himself that he wouldn't forget that name.

--

_Sweat clung to Leaha's forehead in crystalline drops, more gathered along her hairline, stubbornly being chased away by the occasional breeze from the partially opened window. She tucked a strand of her midnight hair behind the shell of her ear, pausing to evaluate the work she had constructed on the pad before her._

_It was a sketch, one of many that she had done of her new favorite subject: her boyfriend, Jess. He was the perfect inspiration for art, dark intelligence and angular body composition gave Leaha exactly what she was looking for to play the central theme of her next batch of drawings, and exactly what every poor, starving art chick wanted: a loveably dangerous boy/man hybrid who not only understood but excited her._

_She'd drawn him with his face half hidden by his wild, electricity charged hair, the whole thing shadowed handsomely by the lighting and her chosen angle. He was writing, one of his few hobbies that wasn't centered around books. Leaha had only known Jess for a little over two months, but even in that short span of time she had seen more in him as a creative being than she had seen in any other man in the past nineteen years of her life._

_The sound of Jess's pen frantically scratching out words in his notebook came to a halt. Leaha heard the distinct sound of him setting down his writing materials on the weathered coffee-table, there were a few seconds of transfer time as Jess closed the distance between the two of them, crossing the room. He stood behind her, gazing down at the drawing Leaha had recently completed._

"_Well, well, aren't we the next Edward Degas," Jess smirked, but kindly enough to show the hint of pride in his voice._

_She looked at him skeptically from her seated position in front of her easel. "Hardly. I don't see any resemblance between you and any form of classical ballerinas."_

_He laughed humorlessly. "I was talking about the whole asymmetrical theme you have going here. All the angles and shadows draw your eye in a diagonal line across the page."_

_She blushed a little and reached out to Jess just as he put his arm around her shoulders. "Introducing Jess Mariano, the seasoned art critic." She joked weakly as Jess pulled her up to face him._

"_I think I'll settle for: Jess Mariano, best lay under twenty." As they talked Jess slipped his arms around her waist, loosely holding her flush against him._

"_Not for long," Leaha warned playfully, sliding a hand across the flat planes of his chest._

"_Oh yeah?" He captured her lips quickly with his own. "Why's that?" Jess mumbled against the skin of her neck. Leaha moved her hands up and wound them around his neck, feeling unnaturally lightheaded as she tangled her fingers in his hair._

"_Because," She tried to hide the slight quiver in her voice, but she was unsuccessful. "In a few hours you won't be nineteen any more."_

"_Well," he left a trail of kisses across her collarbone, moving up to catch the soft contours of her lips. "Then we should make the most of our remaining time."_

"_Can't argue with that logic," Leaha succumbed, half dragging half following Jess as their entwined bodies were propelled towards the bedroom._

--

Four years. It had been four event-filled years since his twentieth birthday so long ago with Leaha. It didn't seem like four years, in fact, it didn't seem like _one_ year, but that's the way time went when he had become an adult. He become less aware of the actual _time_ that sliped away and more conscious of the _events_. The end with Rory, his relationship with Leaha, the writing and purpose that he found in said relationship, saying goodbye to Leaha so she could become a real artist, coming to Philadelphia, becoming a real author—he saw it all pass by like a matter of days, not years.

He thought that maybe all of it–everything he'd been through–was simply preparation for what it was all really about, what life really boiled down to. Jess had never wanted to skip out on any of it, it was who he was, it made him the person that he had become when he'd made that epic phone call earlier today. Now that felt like years ago, the conversation they had shared, talking again after so many years of separation.

Was it really that easy? All it took, just a few simple buttons and he could hear her voice again, talk to her again, visualize her with him?

Three flights of stairs up to his apartment and a few moments of thought later, Jess had retrieved his phone from his back pocket and squinted at the electric light of the screen and keypad as he dialed Rory's cell number. Making a bee-line for his bedroom, Jess tossed his keys in a bowl that had once been a vinyl record of Zeppelin IV, but had been warped in a kiln by a woman who ran a booth containing records that had been turned into household accessories; he already owned two more of her bowls, two of her clocks (one for his bookshelf and another for the wall in the bathroom), as well as a full set of miniaturized coasters.

He kicked off his boots at the foot of his bed, shedding his jacket like worn snakeskin in anticipation as Rory's phone rang for the third time. The only light came from the faint chartreuse block numbers of his digital alarm clock; they read a little past eleven, so Jess was fairly surprised when the ringing stopped and a non-drowsy voice picked up.

"Hello?" Not as girlish as he remembered, but comfortably so. Jess didn't pause for introductory sake, she probably already knew it was him.

"Did you know that I've almost been run over _three times_ on the same street? The same street in _New York_ for that matter? Who gets run over in New York? No one. I'm dead serious, I bet If you checked the statistics on it you'd see that it's a physical impossibility. I mean, traffic is so locked all the time that you can walk faster than you can drive–realistically speaking–and God forbid something's on fire or you're in an ambulance or there's some nut job, cracked out maniac with a gun to your head and you're waiting for the police to get there. No way is traffic moving for you buddy, no dice my friend, but the _second_ that Jess Mariano steps onto the street all traffic _must _surge in any available direction like it's divine fucking rapture or something–"

"Uh, Jess?"

"Yeah?"

He could tell she was smiling on the other end of the phone. "As humorous as your rant has been so far, would you mind telling me why you called so soon? Thought we were going for that whole quit-while-you're-ahead thing."

"Well," Jess reasoned, resting flat out on his mattress, diving down beneath the black linens. "I decided that we really weren't that far ahead. Everything we talked about today was so emotional and serious and you know how much I hate having conversations like that over the phone, I prefer to be in person for the gut-wrenching stuff, so I decided to make today all nice and balanced and I–we–couldn't do that unless we talked about something funny, so that's why I'm doing. I'm sitting here thinking that I should probably repaint my bedroom because when you turn all the lights off the green looks really dark and I'm telling you about the somewhat ominous street that I nearly died on, on three separate occasions. Ok, now it's your turn. Tell me something funny."

Rory giggled into the phone for a little bit before bashfully rubbing her cheek to hide her growing smile. The thought never occurred to her that Jess couldn't see the flaming blush decorating her cheeks, but she bit her lip in nervousness all the same.

"There was this one time where Kirk . . . " She launched herself into a detailed, animated story about a life that they had both lived, both been a part of, once. But one that neither of them felt they had to explain.

They went on like that until the numbers on Jess's clock reached single digits and Rory's yawns grew closer and closer in conversation until she could hardly part with coherent sentences. Sleep came heavily for both, running thick with dreams of times with only pleasant memories and futures yet to be defined.

--

Sunlight had just begun to crest over the Earth's horizon, signaling the beginning of a new day for Stars Hollow and all of its residence, one of those residents being Luke Danes. Jess knew that it was early but it was the most convenient time of day for both men to talk undisturbed. The dinner had yet to open, and the finishing work at Truncheon didn't begin until nine, so that left a somewhat peaceful window of time for Jess and Luke to catch up.

"Hello?"

"You're a dirty rotten meddler, you know that?" Jess said playfully.

Luke sighed. "Good morning to you too."

"Yeah, morning, sunlight, _so early . . . _" He held the phone away to stifle his yawn.

"Late night, dearest nephew of mine?" Luke held the phone up with his shoulder as he took down chairs in the Diner, cleaning the place up so it could open soon for the morning rush.

"I don't know, does two a.m. classify as late?"

"Jess! That can't be healthy, you'll get sick like that!"

"Relax, I take naps. Actually, I get about eight-and-a-half hours, on average. Besides, two a.m. the night before I have to go to work is a bit of a stretch for me, usually I save that for the weekend."

"That's still bad. They have a name for it actually. It's called _binging_ and _purging–_"

"–and it usually applies to food and alcohol, not sleep."

"Says you."

"This is true," Jess burrowed beneath his bed linens, muffling the creaks and groans of his less-than-new apartment. If he was observant enough, he could count the seconds between each faint intake of breath in his insulated cocoon.

"So, any particular reason for the phone pleasantries this morning? Anything you want to tell me?" Luke considered himself a morning person, but on this particular morning he was a little worse for wear. Last night Lorelai had been in concerned mom mode, harping on the news Rory had relayed to her over the phone. Luke, despite his better judgment, had told Lorelai that there wasn't much to be concerned about. He had slept very little after that.

"You mean a reason other than telling you you're a dirty rotten meddler? Nope, that was basically it."

"No other phone calls you wanna tell me about?"

"Wow, does Mrs. Cleo know about you? You'd be a great assistant; although, as a psychic, you should know the answer to that question already."

There was a thoroughly pregnant pause at the end of Jess's response, which Luke pet an end to.

"Lorelai told me you talked to Rory."

There was another pause in which Jess scowled at the knowing tone in his uncle's voice.

" . . . yeah."

"_And._"

"And what?"

"Jess, don't be a smart ass."

"Don't be a dirty, rotten meddler and I might not have to."

"Not funny."

Jess chose that moment to throw the covers off his sleep soaked body, deciding that now was as good a time as any to get up for the workday. As he rummaged around in his room for clothes, Luke sighed into the phone.

"Don't get all bent out of shape," Jess said mildly. "The guilty third party thing can be really unattractive, trust me."

"I knew you'd call her." The older man said smugly.

Jess snorted. "Yeah? Why's that?"

"Because, that's what you and Rory do." Luke answered distractedly, bustling around.

Jess rubbed his sleep worn eyes. "Really not getting that last statement. Clarification has been deemed desirable."

"You two are always going around in circles, you're both turned all weird when it comes to each other–always have been."

"Now who does _that_ remind me of?"

Not getting the hint, Luke asked, "Who?"

"You and Lorelai, Einstein. That whole thing about running around in circles, skirting the truth? Sure you're not talking about yourself there, buddy?"

"So how's the publishing business?" Luke averted. "People still like to buy books?

"Segues not your thing, huh. I wouldn't know much about the book-buying statistics at the moment though. We're almost done with the remodeling, and then the New York branch of Truncheon books will be set and open for business. Nick and I are doing that whole mail-order thing right now, it's a pain in the ass, seriously."

Uncle and nephew talked, moving away from subjects involving the Gilmore Girls and on to things that didn't hold the same kind of sting to them. But Jess, who had woken up with a nagging sense of doubt as well as fear, still felt the sickening pain of yesterday and all it's highlights: good and bad.

There was a deeply suppressed part of Jess that still missed her, missed their talks and their frightening compatibility. But, was any of this really worth the trouble? Did he–he who had gone through so much for her as well as with her–need this?

No.

Need, never.

_Want_ . . . now that was another matter entirely.

--

**A/N: **_Don't forget to review :D_


	6. The Circle Of Understanding

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating**:_ R_

**Date Started: **_7-24-07_

**Date finished**: _8-5-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**: _I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_I hope all of you guys had a great holiday, consider this a belated New Years present. Good news as far as updates are concerned, I got a new computer for Christmas so it will definitely make the writing process much less time consuming. I hope you guys enjoy this chapter, reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Six: The Circle Of Understanding**

Rory Gilmore sat typing at her desk, glancing at the clock at the corner of her computer screen every few minutes. It was almost the end of her workday. Just as she had saved the last few lines of text on her word document, the faint non-annoying _ping_ of her cell phone stole her attention from the piece she had just submitted for editing.

Blindly, she reached out to answer the call without checking the caller ID, thinking that it was Paris or Lane or her mother (or maybe even Jess). But she definitely wasn't expecting the voice on the other end of the line.

It wasn't technically bravery she was displaying at the moment, but that point was arguable enough to Rory, who felt surprised (to say the least) when she heard the incoming voice on the phone. It had been months, years even, since she had expected to hear him on the other end of anything in relation to her. And now, now that she had gone through the same experience _twice_ in the last twenty-four hours--with different men--she felt as if her life was like blood, circulating through her body only to return--changed somehow--to the same vein, the same arteries and blood vessels, her entire circulatory system one giant recycling project. Everything sharp and stinging through her skin, nerves firing off shock waves like a fucking chemical cocktail.

She gave a hurried "Hello" before the response came, his voice like something plated and over-priced. Overly relaxed. Any thoughts of collectiveness were shattered with his greeting of "Hey, Ace. Mind if we talk?"

Yes, she goddamn minded. No word for over a year and all of a sudden Logan Huntzburger wanted to talk?

Hoping upon some miracle that the conversation would be over quickly, along with her increasingly irksome workday, she brushed him off with a quick "I can't talk right now," followed by the sound of the dial tone. She felt her face cooling, nonspecific unsettlement sinking in her chest.

--

It had begun to rain, cold and miserably gray like the dense bottom of a submarine. The evening sky darkening fast.

Her phone rang again, the second time in the last twenty minutes. Avoiding Logan was pointless, she figured. Whatever deep-rooted aversion she had to contact with her ex-boyfriend and almost fiancée would have to wait. If she didn't acknowledge his calls then he would just show up in person, and no part of her even remotely wanted to have that confrontation.

"Talk fast."'

"Whoa, what's with the hostilities here, Rory? I need to talk to you, I'm not kidding."

"What do you want, Logan?" Her apartment was fast approaching, just a few more steps and she'd be on her hallway, a few more and she'd be face-to-face with her front door.

Rounding the corner, her movement ceaced, phone still held to her ear. Numbly, she brought it down to her side, letting it close.

"What are you, why are you here?" She tried to hide the crack at the beginning of her question but they both caught it.

Logan Huntzburger stood before her, dressed to the nines in a tux with heirloom cufflinks complete with a black bow tie. However expensive his attire must have been, he looked like an alcoholic who had just been told that Prohibition was on the rise courtesy of the Federal Government.

"I just . . . I need some answers from you." Logan took a step towards her but retreated when he saw her flinch away, as if it caused her some physical pain.

"Rory-" He started on her with that pleading look that he'd taken to so well at a young age. Some thought it sincere, posh little rich boy asking so nicely with his manners and smooth articulation, but she was wise to his persuasive tones and his ploys. Rory's eyes narrowed.

"You need to go," Her voice sounded stronger this time, like the singing of a thick chord in her chest, an opposing sound to the weak pluck she'd voiced before.

"Look, won't you let me in? Please, can we just talk somewhere other than your hallway?"

She was biting her lip in an attempt to hold back a less-than-friendly remark, shoulders a bit hunched with her arms held protectively over her chest.

"I repeat: what are you doing here?"

He visibly deflated, rosy lips becoming a thin line of concurred misery.

"My fiancée left me at the altar."

The rain fell harder but Rory gave no notice; there was s suspicious stain on the wall next to her in the shape of a handprint that looked an awful lot like blood.

"I just wanted to know why--why you said no."

Sirens blared in the distance, a dog sounded a floor below them.

Her eyes were fixed on a point just above his shoulder, not wanting to look him directly in the eye.

"Because I could still imagine myself with someone else, and the me I saw in that relationship was more realistic than the person I'd become for you."

"You wanted a life with someone else," Logan summarized tonelessly.

Rory supplied a curt nod in response. She opened her mouth to say something, what she didn't know, but he held up a hand to silence her.

"Don't, don't tell me who. I think I already know." He sighed, no more satisfied now that he had heard her answer. It struck her that this was probably the last conversation that he wanted to be having right now, especially with her. She felt a touch of sympathy.

"Are you going to look for her?"

He had already turned to go, his stiffened back was her only sign that he was listening.

"If you really love her, go after her. Maybe that's what she's looking for."

Logan turned back ever so slightly to glance at her over his shoulder.

"Thanks Rory."

"Goodbye, Logan."

He was gone, leaving Rory to sink down on the ratty hallway flooring, the bits of carpeting worn and pressed thin beneath her. The dripping evening grew thick around her with nothing but the bloody handprint to draw her eyes away from the spot where Logan had just stood. For the first time in a life of many first times, Rory felt a true close--a real ending note. There would be something else, there always was. Maybe this time she'd be able to meet it when it came instead of racing back to what she knew to be familiar. It wasn't technically bravery, but it was a start.

--

The rain had begun to let up, something Jess could easily see from his third (technically fourth) story kitchen window that looked into the alleyway on the fringes of the Truncheon property. His fingers curled around the neck of his first beer, pausing momentarily to wonder if the rats would all rush out of the sewer in a great rush of yellow teeth and disease, or if they would scurry underfoot, crawling with their fleshy tails dragging the ground as if they were being chased by overly ambitious snakes. They were everywhere in the big cities; as much as America prided itself on being cleaner and bigger and more wealthy than the rest of the world they still had that pesky bellicose issue of imperfection. No matter. Jess lived on the top floor of his publishing house (along with Nick, who had the apartment across the hall); he could care less about the damn rats, especially tonight.

Today felt more like a series of days, or a series of lives for that matter. His early morning phone conversation with Luke rolled around in his head, words traveling in circles. Always skirting the edge, or the center. What did this mean? This talking and guilty afterthought that maybe none of this, none of them, really made any difference? Why did he care so much, or any at all? But more importantly, why couldn't he stop thinking about the pointlessness and all the blundering and blind mistakes that had set him so far back (and sometimes eons forward) that came from his inability to plan? This was what made people loose their wits and their marbles and any other physical thing of value that represents mental stability. _Let it go._ The thoughts gnawed at him, but they would slip away, eventually all of it would be buried or forgotten. Go out again tonight, play your music loud enough to shake your head, take another drink, smoke another pack, another pair of eyes attached to a seven-digit number to go in his little black book of spread legs and screamed names, go another round, fight until your teeth spin, find one more starving wanna-be-semi-educated-bohemian-high-school-drop-out (just like himself) with a scrap of artistic mind waves and some literary flair, put out another novel that no one will stop to look at, be more than insignificant, go live the fucking American Dream--

He turned away from the window.

--

Asleep as only she could dream. When she was unconscious things only have the capacity to get better. Or so she thought.

Today had been hell.

She wasn't one to bitch and moan when things didn't go her way, in fact, one of Rory's more admirable qualities was her ability to show empathy for others while under stress herself. This was a particularly useful tool when working in a professional system, especially when this trait of selflessness was seen in conjunction with her intelligence and aptitude for hard work. The end result was usually more than satisfactory. But today kindness had begun to escape her.

After Logan's departure things had begun to restore themselves. The rain didn't bother her much because she had gotten inside before it had picked up, being lucky enough to make it home. No. That wasn't what was making her feel like she needed a forklift for all her emotional baggage. What was making her face sting and her vision get bleary wasn't seeing Logan for the first time in over a year, and it wasn't the idea that he was engaged to someone else. It was that still, after all this time, she didn't have what she wanted. Wasn't that why she told him no? Because she wanted a different life with a completely different kind of person? They were opposite charges, the pair of them. Unparalleled in almost every way; their only connection was her--and even that was frail.

And yet, when she went to pick up her phone, reacting instantly in a mechanical flash when she heard the ring tone, knowing full well who it was, she couldn't help but feel a little hopeful at the sound of his greeting. His words running together like smudged ink, vowels somewhat cracked, hoarse even; the serpentine hiss of air through his lips when he used the letter S--all of it spoken at least an octave lower than when they had first met each other. The sound of growth.

A ray of heat shot up from her legs to the hollow ocean in her pelvic sphere, a delicious sloshing above the crest of her inner thighs. Rory had to bite her knuckle to keep herself from laughing (or sighing) when she came to the realization that Jess--who she had known and longed for when he had been an alluring boy/teenager hybrid--was now a man.

She wanted to know when it had happened. Her chest constricted at the thought that she could have been there to see it herself, could have been with him to feel it too. Maybe she would have grown up sooner without the need of married deflowerings and questioned futures and felonies and promises that meant nothing and years that had been squandered away.

"I wonder how long it'll rain like that." Her voice sounded far off, misty.

"Bringing up the weather, Rory? Are we really that nervous?"

"Ha, ha. Not nervous, just tired. Talk to me some more."

--

They had passed through many subjects, each talking in turn about their day and their work but not mentioning what both of them had failed to bring up. Bitterly, Jess had no choice but to admit that maybe there had been some truth to Luke's words earlier that day. Luke, who knew more than he let on; Luke, who had always tried to give him sound advice when it came to Rory; Luke, who had taken his side when no one else would; Luke, who had secretly hoped—if only unrealistically—that Jess and Rory would be able to really be with each other the way that Jess had always hoped to see Luke and Lorelai together. None of them were the same, but both men knew they weren't all that different either.

What had he said about circles.? Always darting around, skirting the edges while shying away from the center. But every time he had tried to dive in the gripping velocity of its core had sent him reeling, only to spit out his remains on the whirlpools edge. He was back in the circle but now slightly more afraid of where his actions would leave him.

"I saw someone today," Rory toyed with the edge of her sweater, picking at the worn fabric covering her palms.

"That definitely tells me something specific there. They should put you on the Breaking New segment of local access. They government would despise you, you'd send everyone in your county with a cable connection into a panic." Jess replied with trademark sarcasm; Rory couldn't help but hide her grin.

Her smile disappeared with thoughts of what she was about to bring up into their, so far, healthy conversation. Chances were that Jess didn't care to hear about Logan, but the idea that he was engaged to someone who wasn't Rory would most likely make Jess considerably more cheerful.

"Silly man. Guess who pulled a Houdini and appeared in my hallway as I was coming home from work today."

"Santa Clause, and you're disappointed because you recently converted to Judaism."

"Close. Think of my most recent male disappointment." Rory said, not attempting to curb the edge in her words.

"Ah," Realization dawned. Both of their tones had grown serious. "I'm going to assume you mean Logan."

"Yep. And can you guess where he was coming from?"

"I'm assuming from that unsure-but-still-angry tone you've adopted that it's not good."

"He's getting married and his fiancée left him at the altar so he decided to stop by and see why I didn't want to marry him. As if anything I could say now really has any importance." Her words were blasé, uncomital in her lack of emotion.

"Rory," Jess started, unsure whether to be annoyed or sympathetic. It was times like this when he retreated back to that seventeen-year-old notion that he was being played.

"I don't care what he does, or who he marries. It's none of my business anymore. I don't have to think about whether my boyfriend is cheating on me while he's halfway around the world for six months at a time because he's not my boyfriend anymore. And I don't have to suffer through that holier-than-thou attitude from my mother because she never had a serious relationship with an Ivy League business heir who never had to come up with an actual plan for their life. This is stupid. I just wanted him to go away."

Jess skillfully changed the topic of their conversation. "From what Luke's told me you're probably tired of being away, a whole year of traveling and writing political articles. Did that ever get old?"

"Not at first, but it does get to you after a while. I never thought I'd become one of those mathematical workaholics that love routine, but it's a nice alternative to being in a different city every three days or so with no clean clothes and no one to talk to besides Tris, and she was from Texas."

He laughed. "You say that like it explains everything."

"Tall, thin. Had lots of curly read hair. She wore a cowboy hat."

"Sounds like a barrel of fun."

"Shut up."

"Ashamed of your friends now Rory? I never would have thought you capable." Jess teased.

"Not ashamed, just exhausted at the thought of having to listen to a twangy accent—however intelligent the words—quizzing various politicians on their views relating to capital punishment."

"Sounds like an afflictive relationship if you ask me."

"Well, I've found that almost anything is possible if taken in small increments." She spoke wisely.

Jess shifted positions on the rug-covered bit of floor that he was occupying, his expression growing thoughtful. "Unfortunately we can't all be saints like you. Can't say that I've picked up on that concept yet. I'm waiting for it to show up in one of Dr. Phil's bestsellers."

"You know, I'm pretty sure that he's mentioned the only-in-moderation method a couple of times in various volumes. You're getting slack on your self-help mental encyclopedia. Maybe there are a few Dr. Phil books yet unread and unknown to you."

"Actually, now that you mention it, I've never cracked open _The Ultimate Weight Loss Challenge._ And—funny enough—the only-in-moderation concept sounds like a terrific candidate for validation in a book about self-image in relation to obesity."

She snickered. "Maybe that should be the subject of your next book. They say that hindsight's twenty twenty you know."

"What cracked manual did you get that out of? Or—let me guess—it came from some chick bestseller that somebody's grandmother picked up at the grocery store. Most likely shoved between Norah Roberts and Nicholas Sparks."

Rory scoffed. "Don't criticize your colleges. And that didn't come from any manual, that was all Doctor Gilmore. In fact, you're lucky to have caught her on a steadily tiring day or she wouldn't have thrown herself so completely into mind consuming banter. Otherwise she would have laughed off this safely distant subject three conversation points ago."

"Maybe you should ditch the lab coat and the crucifix for tonight. Anonymity is much more stylish."

The cityscape from Rory's apartment window was completely submerged in the inky downpour of rain, brightened by the golden touches of light from New York's skyscrapers.

"I think I can get the message across." Rory padded the few feet from her seat on the couch to her unlit kitchen. "Oh, and Jess, by the way, never compare me to religious figures ever again."

"Any reason behind that?" Jess pried, somewhat curious.

"Bad high school memories are attached to Virgin Mary references." Rory muttered darkly. Jess took the opportunity to laugh at the idea of Rory being ridiculed for her unwavering sweetness.

Before Jess could branch off into the explain-your-comment section of their discussion, a beep was heard on his end of the phone indicating another incoming call. Jess told Rory to hold on while he switched over to call waiting.

"Jess, how many times have I told you to answer your phone? I've called at least four times today and you either haven't answered or the busy signal's been on. What, do you not have time for your poor mother anymore? Are you screening your calls with that caller ID thing? T.J. just loves that. Hey, did I tell you about—"

The female voice was cut off by Jess, who, impatiently, desired an end to the just begun conversation. "What do you want Liz, I'm sort of in the middle of something."

"You sound just like Luke. You're both always so busy. What do you do that takes up so much _time_?"

"We both run businesses, you know, work and all that . . . "

"Oh yeah, my son the business owner," Liz said affectionately. "And when am I ever going to see that place of yours? You're too secretive, I've always told you that. It can't be healthy, all those bottled up emotions never do anyone any good. You need to get stuff like that out, Jess. Personally, I think that's why men die young in this family. I swear that's it."

"Things come out well enough when I'm writing, so I don't think you have to worry about me peeling out any time soon." Jess said tiredly, slightly concerned that his ears would go numb if he had to listen to Liz ramble for much longer.

"I've tried reading that book of yours so many times but I'm just not a good reader. I get as far as page seven and I get distracted by T.J., or Doula, or the phone. . . "

"Hey, that's right, you have _another_ kid to pay attention to right now."

"Alright, alright I'll let you go. It'd be nice if you called me back every once in a while. But I haven't got a clue what I'd say if you did. Bye sweetheart." She rang off. Jess clicked back over.

"Who was it?" Rory questioned mildly, holding her cell phone between her cheek and her shoulder while she rearranged the contents of her coupon drawer.

"Liz," Jess grumbled. "Crazy woman calls me at least eight times a day, I swear. She'll be doing laundry or at the grocery store or watching QVC or chopping zucchini or something and she'll decide it's the perfect time to annoy her increasingly busy son who just happens to not answer her calls when he can manage it."

"Well tell him to never answer his phone and then he won't have to worry about it ever again."

"Yeah, but I get calls for work on this phone, and if I don't answer them then I won't make any money and I'll loose my business and my apartment at the same time because I live above the book store and then I'll be like that schizophrenic hobo on fifth who sells short stories so he can buy socks."

" . . . or you could just get caller ID."

"Sounds like an investment worth looking into. Thanks for the tip."

"You're welcome."

Silence settled on both ends of the phone. It was the first rut they'd fallen into during the dialogue they'd been sharing so far. Jess searched his mind for other topics to bring up that he knew she'd respond to; Luke's words floated back to him again. He flinched.

"I talked to Luke today."

"Oh, what did he say?"

"He wanted to talk about you." Jess, who had been staring at the pack of cigarettes left on the floor a few inches from his hand, had begun to trace lines back and forth over the face of the pack. He felt the nagging urge to light up, his craving building in strength the longer he waited. Lazily, the twenty-four-year-old gave into temptation both in nicotine and conversation. He searched for his lighter; jean pocket, floor, shirt pocket: all empty.

"Apparently he thinks our patterns of interaction are redundant and idiotic. A bit hypocritical, don't you think?" Jess said rhetorically, finding his zip-o underneath his untouched notebook that housed the unfinished three hundred-page manuscript that would some day become another one of his novels. He was taking much more time with this project, feeling that he could have done more with his first novel if he'd actually believed that it would be read by someone else, let alone published. But, as circumstances were, he hadn't been able to work on said manuscript for some time. The expansion of Truncheon and the remodeling of the publishing house itself had given him a very real distraction from his literary endeavors.

"Yeah, but I'm glad they're together again. Mom and Luke," Rory clarified.

Jess made a noise of agreement as he flicked open the tiny silver cap to reveal the quietly dancing flame beneath. He inhaled quickly and projected smoke outward in the form of rings..

"He'll ask her soon, you know." Jess did nothing to hide the knowing expression that he had taken, falling into a traceable pattern with his breathing.

"Oh, I know. I just hope that after all this time that, for once, everything works out ok, for everybody."

At first he said nothing, giving his throat time to catch up with the tightening sensation in his chest. "I know exactly what you mean."

--

**A/N: **_I won't be able to post another chapter for a while because exams start this coming week. For the next seventy-two hours my life will include nothing but French and Journalism, and then Biology and Algebra II for the four or so days after that. Wish me luck. Reviews will brighten my day when I forget all my irregular verbs :D_


	7. Glass Mask

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started: **_8-6-07_

**Date Finished: **_8-27-07_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:** _To everyone who reads this fic I have some important news. I know you guys feel kind of drawn out with the way the story's been going so far, I don't blame you. I mean, six chapters in and just a bunch of phone conversations? So here I am telling you that this story will progress, maybe not faster in the coming chapter, the pace has pretty much been set, but this story is a Jess/Rory and it is rated M for a legitimate reason. I want this story to be real, something that could easily happen on the show (with a few mature exceptions). On that note, I now present chapter seven. Reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Seven: Glass Mask**

Water slid over his lean shoulders, pools of moisture collecting on the cold tile floor of Jess's humid bathroom. He wiped a clean streak over his foggy mirror with his hand, clearing the misted glass. He slicked his hair away from his face, wrapping himself up in a towel due to the cool draft from the open bathroom door.

It was mid evening, the city of New York damp and swelling from the rain that had fallen some hours before. Jess let his towel drop to the floor and stepped past it, lying out on his unmade bed. The haphazard sheets tickled his exposed stomach, the shy contact that made him feel heavy with sleep. He shifted onto his back and ran his fingers over his closed eyelids, thinking.

When they first met she had reminded him of an add he'd seen once, one of those huge, billboard size deals that were plastered on the sides of buildings around time square. It'd been a picture of some blonde chick laying in the middle of a grassy field, an ad for shampoo or something, and the girl had two or three yellow Labrador puppies crawling all over her. Rory hadn't looked anything like the girl, but the minute he saw her the image was forever connected in his mind with his initial reaction towards her. She had the same sort of exquisite innocence that painters spent decades trying to replicate and capture.

The olive skin along his cheekbone was pressed against the crisp bed linins. He briefly entertained the unrealistic film reel of Rory next to him in bed, her hot little body pressed against his while he slept. It was the kind of fantasy that his mind had visited many times before, although none of his previous musings had held the imminent promise that this fantasy possessed. The idea held substance. Rory was no longer out of reach. In fact, she was easily within his grasp. The very notion made his abs clench as he allowed his mind to wander further. The heated blush of her cheeks and the arousing sensation of her nails digging into his shoulder blades, rumpled sheets pooled around her waist lazily, her curtain of dark hair surrounding the two of them as she leaned over to kiss him; his mind ran through these scenarios in quick, rapid succession.

Contact. That's what his body was desperately seeking and attempting to inform him. Even if it was just to see her, talk with her in person instead of the cautionary fill-in-the-blank phone calls they had shared over the past few months. There was a definite line in their current interaction, a margin of unexplored territory that he was burning to write in.

The feral, animalistic side of him wanted to claim her, that crazy Italian Alfa-male mentality that could poison as easily as it could posses. He'd gone through puberty watching other guys stew in their jealousy. He'd wanted women before, girls from other times, before and after Rory, companions for a man that found himself continually settling for what was easy or convenient. But this, the drug-like heaviness in his spine and the deep pull of his lower abdomen,_ this_ was what had struck Michael Corleone and Robbie Turner into dumb silence and tunnel-like actions. He felt it, he hated it, and at the same time he wanted to feed it and watch it progress into a sex-filled delirium.

He rose from his bed and began to dress, gathering clothes and attempting to mute his earlier thoughts. The sounds of the city flooded back into his bedroom through his reconnected mind. It was early still and there was much thinking to be done on his part

--

He kept his notebooks hidden. Imagine, a grown man hiding his journal in his own house. But it was something he'd done since his early teens when he'd started keeping one. It wasn't something he wrote in every day, or every week, even. The entries were sporadic at best, ranging from three times a day to three months apart. But Jess had never been one to make plans; organization had escaped the left side of his brain very early on. Examples of this could be seen in said notebooks on multiple accounts. Every page was covered, literally, with words and sketches of nearly every kind. He'd drawn a few choice landscapes from every place he'd ever lived, all of them featured in no real order. He made detailed lists or documentation of things that irked him. Like today, when he'd gotten news that he would have to push back the opening of his publishing house two more weeks.

A list had then begun to mentally formulate itself inside his mind; number of days this would worry him: fourteen. Number of items he had then gone out to pick things up just to get away from Truncheon and all it's incomplete glory: three. Those items being a bank deposit from his bookkeeper's apartment five blocks away, the pair of boots that someone had abandoned behind a rusted bench on ninth and sixth, and a typewritten manuscript from his most promising—and penny-less—unpublished client, hence the typewriter. Number of times he had contemplated getting off the rug and hurling himself out the window: eight.

The idea's level of appeal didn't increase in conjuncture to the number of times he considered it. Mainly because he was just uncomfortable enough on the floor to seriously contemplate moving but just tired enough to stay where he was.

A very detached variation of his senses heard his door being unlocked, opened, shut, and locked again. A part of him hoped it was a burglar or an assassin, but only a small part.

Jess was unsurprised to see Nick's boyish frame paused in the doorway, bemused.

"Man, what are you doing on the floor? Counting the cracks in the ceiling . . . again." Nicked walked over to the couch in an exaggerated manner and sank down without invitation, knowing that it wasn't needed.

"No, I'm decomposing as we speak. I circled the coroners number in the phone book for you, you know, since I love going out of my way for those I care about."

"So wonderful to know I'm held in such high esteem." Nick muttered dryly. Jess remained motionless.

Leaving his eyes closed, Jess posed a question that any other normal person would have already asked. "So."

"It might help if you got away from the one word conversations there Jessie."

He sighed. "Fine, 'what's up'. That sound better?" Jess mocked.

"There's a good boy," Nick said cheerfully.

"Huh," was all Jess could manage.

"What are we _doing?"_ Nick asked in a somewhat muffled tone of voice. This fact was unsurprising seeing as he had his face buried in one of Jess's couch cushions.

"The question you should be asking here isn't plural, it's singular. _We're_ not doing anything. I—on the other hand—am sleeping; you're just sitting there on the couch, all helpless and dejected looking."

Nick sat up so he could survey his friend, roused from his passive stance, or lack thereof. "We should go out."

"Like now?" Jess wondered lazily.

"No, not now. I'm too tired to do anything now. Well, except maybe help myself to one of your beers—"

"—bring me some of my vodka-tea stuff while you're up. It's in a jar next to the Peroni's you so desperately crave."

Nick's voice began to fade in and out of volume as he talked on his way to Jess's kitchen. "I just don't see why two young, good-looking guys such as ourselves don't spend more time with the fairer sex—"

Jess's smirk caused Nick to silence himself in embarrassment. "And t_hat_," he said with a flourish, "is exactly why you are a walking train wreck when it comes to girls."

Nick gave a sound of neither encouragement nor disdain.

"Go ahead, ask."

"Ask what?"

"Whatever it is you're thinking."

"You serious?"

Jess sat up as well. "As a heart attack."

He took a seat in the black velvet chair that his bookkeeper had given him when he first moved into his current apartment over the future home of Truncheon Books. It had been presented as a housewarming gift. It was the kind of thing that Leaha would have loved to paint him sitting in; its dark colors suited his personality and did wonders for his gold-flecked eyes.

"How often do you, you know . . . how often is normal?"

It wasn't difficult to guess the meaning of Nick's words. He was notoriously awkward when it came to women. Jess tried to remain serious for Nick's benefit. "Don't worry about normal and all that bullshit. I mean, you do realize that I have a casual relationship at the moment? Just think back to the times you've seen Evan around, that's how often."

"You mean that's all you guys do? Just have sex?"

He shook his head. "No. It's like regular dating, just without all sorts of unrealistic commitments. You can keep all your deep, dark secrets and no ones feelings get hurt. It's easy." Jess shrugged.

"That doesn't sound easy, not for me anyway." Nick took a swig of beer. "I'm nervous around girls," he clarified. "God, how many guys have that problem at twenty-four for christsake? I mean, I can imagine _fourteen_—" He broke off.

"Lot's of guys have the same problem that you've got. Look, the issue here is that you aren't looking for the right _type_ of girl."

Nick's expression changed. "What'd you mean?"

"I mean," Jess continued, "that you need to find someone who's like you. You know, who likes to do the same sort of stuff and they're interested in the same kinds of things. You should be looking for compatibility. If you can find that then everything else will feel easy."

"You ever found that?"

"Compatibility?" Jess thought back to his previous phone conversation. "More or less." He evaded.

There was a comfortable silence in which both men thought of separate things, their minds far away from each other but not so different. It was in this silence that Jess reached for his journal in which he had previously written of his frustrations involving Rory. He tore out the insensitive page and ripped it in half, and then fourths, and eighths, and so on until there was nothing left but a hand full of confetti.

--

Glass. The floor looked like it was made from glass. Was that why she had a tightened, stinging sensation in the pit of her stomach? The table was made from glass; the kind of opulent office furniture that you saw in movies about politics and crooked businessmen.

Her coworkers sat around the table in their stiff navy suites and transparent expressions of seriousness and false importance. She gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the commotion below. Rory then looked back up at the other men and women seated around her but she quickly glanced down through the tabletop at her shoes, the only healthy alternative. Her stomach gave a painful lurch every time she listened too closely to the pompous conversations being voiced around her or saw the arrogant glint of a Rolex against someone's bloated wrist. The suffocating quality of the room was beginning to make her gag, make her face burn in an all-too-familiar way.

She was able to identify the emotion much more effectively now. Over the past few years she'd become well acquainted with the physical side effects of shame. But what was it that was making her feel so degenerate, so meaningless that if she squinted hard enough the porcelain hand that she had carelessly left on the glass tabletop would burn and slowly dissolve until it was as clear as the rough cut glass beneath her? She was as see through as the transparent faces that controlled her paycheck and her former employment references. Lightheaded nausea made her turn pale at the sight of a window washer dangling fifty stories above the ground. She was the only one that flinched.

--

The drive to Hartford from New York wasn't a very long one. In fact, for Rory Gilmore, if felt impedingly short.

It was dark by the time she pulled into the driveway of her grandparents expansive, upper-class home, noting that she was already fifteen minutes late for Friday Night Dinner. Even years after it's necessity the Gilmore family had kept up the tradition and Rory was never one to disrespect the rules. But on this particular evening she wasn't looking forward to sitting through an awkward dinner and having to drive all the way back home to her empty apartment and the nagging question of what came next in her career.

One of her grandmother's dispensable maids answered the door and led her into the living room where her mother and Luke were seated along with Richard and Emily.

"Oh, hello Rory," Emily chimed from her seat across the room.

"I'm sorry I'm late, traffic . . . " She trailed off as they all made their way into the dinning room upon her grandmother's request. Luke gave her an encouraging smile while Lorelai hugged her in greeting. For a moment Rory's queasiness subsided.

They made their way through salads and were halfway into their main course before Rory said a word. She had been trying to focus all her attention very intently on the stem of her crystal glass but she was shaken by the questioning voice of her grandmother.

"Rory, have you been listening to a word I've said this entire evening?" The elder Gilmore asked.

She looked up, blinked, and decided that some sort of explanation was needed. The queasy feeling she had been experiencing since the eye-opening board meeting had peaked a few moments before. But now Rory was enveloped with a placid sense of calm.

"I quit my job today."

Four jaws quickly fell to the floor but Rory made a swift recovery.

"Don't worry, I'm still making money. I've got an agent who's getting me articles to write—and I'm still being published—just as a freelance journalist instead of a staff writer."

The fist one to speak up was Richard, Rory's grandfather, who was the quickest to recover after Rory shared her bit of startling news.

"You know Rory, that's actually a very smart career move. As long as you keep up a steady stream of work, well, you could end up earning more money that way and make more contacts for future positions within the business." He nodded wisely from his seat at the head of the table.

Rory smiled mildly at her grandfather. "Thanks grandpa, I'm glad you approve."

"Why didn't you like your first job?" Lorelai asked curiously. "I mean, you were only there for, what was it, three-and-a-half months?"

She frowned. "I don't know. I was just sitting there this afternoon in one of those meetings with all the board members and important people that I'm supposed to impress and I just sat there feeling sick the whole time and my face did that burning thing that it does sometimes. And these guys are sitting there all decked out in Brooks Brothers and Armani and I was thinking: how is this in any way significantly changing anything? And then I started thinking about how nobody reads magazines anyway, so there's no way any of it _could_ matter. So by then I was still feeling sick, worse by the minute actually, so I thought about all the magazines I've seen left lying around places. Doctor's offices, subway stations, grocery stores, park benches, just about everywhere. I realized that nobody reads the articles in the first place so why do something that isn't going to make a difference? Now I just want to write things that I think are important. I want to actually care."

She paused after giving her little speech to actually taste the food in front of her, suddenly starving. "Wow grandma, this chicken's really good."

--

Back at her apartment in New York, Rory lay half-submersed in steaming bathwater, her skin pink and somewhat shriveled from osmosis. Suds from her shower jell had gathered in small clouds of foam over the waters rippling surface, concealing only scattered areas of her unclothed body.

In the womb of her bathtub she could think with calm precision. It was all becoming clear to her. Somewhere down the line she had stopped being honest with herself, and everyone else, too. But tonight she had said what she really thought and—unsurprisingly—she felt a nerve-pinching weight shirt. The door was finally closed, the last word written. It was her first ending, the first time she really said No to something bigger than herself.

_I said No._

--Debutants, salmon puffs, cocktail parties, Birkin bags, pool houses, drunken bridal parties, cheating boyfriends, disappointments, high society snobs—

Over. Done. For real this time.

The Real Rory Gilmore was back and ready to make up for lost time. Gingerly, she lifted a semi-dry arm from the side of her tub over to its edge where her cell phone lay, unopened. It had been four days since his last call, through the course of which she had kept her phone on her person at all times but she had tried not to feel any form of disappointment when it failed to ring. After all, their last conversation had shown that Jess had a variety of things to consume his time. Not to mention the fact that they had made no commitments, no agreements. She had no right to feel jaded or expectant. There was no way she could assume that Jess would call again; those weren't the kind of methods he used. Instead of berating her to the point of annoyance like some of the other men she had dated, Jess had always let her slowly realize the things she already knew, to accept her own thoughts as the truth, to let her make her own decisions.

It had taken her nearly seven years, but she finally knew what she wanted.

Going through her list of recent calls, Rory dialed Jess's number from the relaxing confines of her bathroom. It was nearly midnight on a Friday, there was a seventy percent chance that he was awake; the thirty percent included the possibility of Jess being asleep or engaged in other night-like activities.

He picked up on the third ring.

"Hey Jess, it's Rory." A pause. He greeted her in a pleasantly surprised fashion. "Yeah, I've got some news for you. Three guesses as to who is currently out of a job."

She didn't even try to hide the smile that had spread across her face.

--

"Hello?"

"Rory!"

"Oh, hey mom."

The older woman sounded energetically cheerful. "Guess who has good news."

"Ah, you know that's a hard one. Sure you can't just tell me and suspend all the unnecessary _parler_?"

"Of course not. What kind of mother would I be if I just handed everything to you without making you squirm a little beforehand?"

"The kind that gets lots of hugs and candy on mothers day?" Rory tried.

"Wrong! Not that I don't like the hugs, or the candy, the candy's pretty damn good actually, but that's besides the point—"

"Oh? Point? We have a point at the end of this discussion?"

"Absolutely. And we'll get to it if you just play along a teeny bit longer." She teased.

The younger girl was quick to respond. "Playing."

"Alright, are you sitting down?" Lorelai asked.

"No. Why? I thought you said this was good news, not sit-down-so-you-don't-fall-over kind of news." Rory accused.

"It is good—trust me. If goodness could be graded this sucker would get a big red smiley face and three of those stickers that teachers are so fond of plastering on assignments."

"Still not getting why I have to be seated to hear this."

"Because, I want you to be able to jump up and start a conga line when you hear it."

"I think your wishes on this particular issue are going to have to be sidestepped for the welfare of mankind in general."

"Well, I think mankind will just have to get over it _because _LukeandIareengaged!"

"W-what?"

"Sorry." She let out a breath. "I said that Luke and I are engaged!" A beat. "Again!"

"Oh mom! That's wonderful." Rory exclaimed as she unlocked the front door of her apartment. "Have you set a date yet?"

"A month from tomorrow." Lorelai said happily.

"Wow, that's—"

"--Sudden?"

"Yes."

"And unexpected?"

"Not so much the last one," Rory said knowingly.

"You knew?" Lorelai asked, shocked.

"From a non-direct source, yeah, I had some idea."

"That can't be fare. How can everybody else on the Earth know about my engagement before I do?" The elder Gilmore questioned incredulously.

Rory laughed into the mouthpiece of her cell phone. "You're on the outside of very important inside information."

"_Oh_."

"Oh? What kind of 'oh' was that?"

"Nothing," Lorelai tried to cover herself. "Just wondering if your supper secret inside information came from our dear friend Jason Bourne."

Rory visibly blanched. "Jess mom, you can refer to him as Jess. And yeah, he told me a couple of days ago. Luke had mentioned it to him or something."

"Hmm, well, that's nice. It's good that they talk," she finished.

"Yes it is," Rory responded.

The corner of Lorelai's mouth twitched in a knowing gesture. "You know, it's also good that you guys talk, it really is. I mean—"

"Mom," Rory interrupted, "we don't have to talk about Jess if you don't want—"

"No!" Lorelai said a little loudly. She slumped against the back of her couch in exaggeration. "What I'm trying to say is that I want you to be able to tell me things without thinking you have to give me the censored version of your life." Lorelai took a breath. "I'm sorry. I just don't want there to be any taboo subjects between us. Boy's included."

"Look, it's ok. I've been rethinking a lot of things lately. Did I tell you that I talked to my editor today?" Rory asked conversationally, expertly changing the subject.

"Oh, you didn't mention it. I'm guessing this is the guy who keeps you in work now that you don't have a job with that magazine anymore?"

Rory kicked her heels off on her way into the kitchen, nodding her head as she did so, but then realizing that her mother couldn't see said head nodding because she was in Connecticut and not New York. "Yeah, I just got back from his office. I've never known any other editor to meet with writers on a Saturday afternoon but Hedges is a very odd man. He's already got me lined up for three different articles, all of them for newspapers."

"Hedges?" Lorelai questioned, bemused.

"It's short for Edward Headsburrough, " Rory clarified while she dug through the take-out drawer. "He's like seventy years old with this unrealistically strong Scottish accent, which makes him kind of hard to understand over the phone, so he has writers come see him at their hour of convenience to make up for it."

"Does he wear a kilt?" Lorelai asked eagerly.

"Would you be crushed if I told you he came to work every day in a jogging outfit?"

"Possibly."

"Well then I'll stick to my cone of silence routine that I pull whenever I'm stuck with a question that has no happy answer." Rory answered sadly, flicking through the menu from the Indian restaurant three blocks away.

"Damn your cone of silence. That must be some untapped genetic fluke because you sure didn't pick it up from me."

"As if half of Connecticut didn't already know that." She joked.

"So what are you doing tonight?" Her mother asked, picking at the wick of a Yankee candle that sat unused on her cluttered coffee table.

"I'll probably order food and get started on a few of those articles that Hedges gave me. Research mainly, a couple of outlines."

"No hot dates for my young, single daughter all alone in the big city?" Lorelai exclaimed disappointedly.

"Not tonight I'm afraid."

"What about later this week? Or _next_ Saturday, what are you doing then?"

Rory frowned. "Nothing, whatever, I don't know. Why is this impor—oh." She stopped and set the menu down that she had previously been holding. "You think I'm seeing Jess behind your back, don't you? Is that why you're being so paranoid?"

Lorelai pinched the bridge of her nose to subside the headache that she already felt coming. "No sweets, it's just that you haven't dated much since your break-up with Logan and I don't know, I just thought that Jess might be the thing to pull you out of this funk you've been in. That's all, honest."

"Oh," Rory mumbled, genuinely surprised. "You think I'm still hung up on Logan?"

"Well yeah, the thought has crossed my mind a few times."

Rory sighed, sinking down in a chair at her wood-topped kitchen table. "No, I'm not upset over Logan. The reason I haven't been dating is because I've been working and trying to figure out how to be an adult without defining myself on what stage of a relationship I'm in. Besides, Logan is probably married by now."

"Married? To Who?"

"Don't know exactly. He showed up in front of my apartment the other day so he could ask me why I didn't want to marry him. See, his fiancée left him at the altar."

Lorelai gasped in real surprise, with a slight hint of malicious glee. "You're kidding."

"Nope. Seems appropriate thought, doesn't it."

"What'd you tell him?" Lorelai wondered.

Rory chewed on the inside of her cheek as she thought about how best to phrase her answer. "Basically, I told him that I could see myself happier unmarried, living a different kind of life than the one I'd be expected to live if I'd stayed with him."

"That sounds about right," her mother replied.

The stained oak of Rory's kitchen table appeared unbreakably solid beneath her ivory fingertips. She looked from the knots in the wood to the lines that surrounded them, brushing her hand in an invisible pattern over its surface.

"Yeah," Rory mumbled, "it does."

--

**A/N:** _The meat of the story is pretty much established so there will be more interaction in future chapters between Jess and Rory. Again, I'm sorry for making you guys wait but I wanted the characters to be complete and developed before any major plot changes. I love to hear what you guys think, so please review._


	8. Extraneous Solutions

**Title:** _Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started:** _8-27-07_

**Date Finished:** _9-12-07_

**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Gilmore Girls. All of this belongs to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the folks at the WB._

**Summary:** _It was like staring down the barrel of a gun or over the edge of some great height. The expanse is so broad yet totally singular; a cliff, a bullet, a face. Books and wit would never write the ending for her. Future Fic, Literati_

**A/N:** _This is one of my favorite chapters in this story, and I think it's one that you guys are going to like. I've gone slowly with the Jess/Rory contact in this fic but if you're interested I have another R/J story I'm writing and it's kind of like my revenge on Logan's character for the way seasons six and seven turned out. The Jess/Rory moments come faster in This Is How I Disappear than in Pulse. As always, I love reviews. _

**Chapter Eight: Extraneous Solutions**

"So, how long are you gonna be gone?"

"Don't know."

"A ballpark figure"

"Couldn't say."

"Rough estiment."

"Sorry, my estimation skills are on the fritz today."

"You have my deepest sympathies."

"Good to know."

"Seriously."

"Do you think my answer is anything but?"

Nick did a motion that implied his dramatized death in an attempt to get Jess's attention. The darker of the two men didn't even glance up from the dog-eared manuscript he was dissecting.

"Je—ess!" Nick sighed, his face muffled by the sleeve of his sweater.

"What," Jess replied, his tone uninterested.

"I at least need to know if you're going to be here for—"

"—The opening," the shorter man finished. "Yeah, I'll be here."

This answer caused a positive change in Nick, who perked up considerably after Jess's renascence. "So," he started, ignoring the silent roll of Jess's eyes at the monosylabalistic conversation starter. "Why are you leaving again?"

"My uncle's getting married, the one who let me live with him for two years? Yeah, he wants me to be the best man in his wedding." He made a big red ex over an unnecessary paragraph, keeping his tawny eyes trained to his work.

Nick nodded to show that he understood. "Didn't you live with him when you were in ah, High School?"

"Junior and Senior year."

"Hmm, that's interesting, really, realty interesting."

Jess glanced up at Nick, who was obviously squirming and fixed him with a tired yet penetrating expression. "Is there a point to the awkward interrogation that you're orchestrating here, or am I really more tired than I thought?"

Nick seemed to be visibly crumbling under Jess's serious gaze. "Well, you know what they say about the stuff sleep deprivation does to the mind—"

"Spit it out, will ya."

Hiding behind his golden hair, Nick was unable to rectify his obvious transparency. "Is that girl going to be there?"

"Which girl?"

Nick's silver-blue eyes narrowed. "You know which girl. Stupid looks unconvincing on you, Mariano."

"Can't say that I agree. Want to fill me in?" Jess questioned mildly.

"The girl that you talk with on the phone all the time—even though you have a girlfriend—"

"I don't have a girlfriend," Jess interrupted.

"Beneficial friend, casual sex partner, whatever. You've got somebody man, what are you going to do with this other girl?"

"Rory," He corrected. "And, to sooth your aching conscience, I'll let you know that I'm not doing anything with her. We just talk. That's is, no plans, no ulterior motive."

He wasn't really lying, not completely. Maybe sort of.

Nick scoffed. "Bullshit."

Jess remained unfazed. "Don't gibe me that. C'mon, do you sleep with every girl you talk to? No. Nobody does."

"Yeah, but you know Evan wouldn't be ok with it if she knew." Nick said wisely, resulting in a shrug from Jess.

"She doesn't have any right to be. She agreed to the terms of a _casual _relationship—no commitments. Free range to do whatever with whoever whenever you feel like it." Jess lit the cigarette that he'd left perched on the shell of his ear a few minutes prior. Flicking his lighter shut, the young man visibly relaxed as the rush of nicotine made its way through his nervous system.

"Yeah, but you know that she's just _dying_ to get you to commit. I'm serious man, that girl wants you for keeps and all you want is, you know." He made a flippant movement with his hands. Nick's discomfort was just one more reason for Jess's infamous smirk to appear.

"All I want is what, Nick? C'mon, is it the thing that your strict Catholic upbringing glossed over so many times?"

"Shut up."

Jess blew smoke rings in the direction of his living room window, framing the indigo sky with a blue haze. It was Jess's last night in New York before his departure for Stars Hollow. The wedding wasn't for another seven days, but time off had never sounded better to Jess. The past year-and-a-half had been one stressful project after another, progressing into his latest business endeavor, the expansion and opening of the New York branch of Truncheon Books. The likes of which were almost complete, and—to Jess's great relief—easily managed without his continual input. Almost all of his plans had been set into motion or had been recently completed. The move had been more intricate than he had previously expected, but Jess was hoping (more like counting) on the gain to outweigh the loss.

Thoughts suck as these rolled through his head the next morning as he drove out of New York for the first time in months. Frost had coated the ground like the icing of a wedding cake, creamy white and smooth, all of it wrapped up like crystalline sweetness.

He tried to keep his mind on mundane topics while he drove, manuscripts he had to edit, exit signs, the oil that would inevitably have to be changed, by Gypsy no doubt, in his 1968 Dodge Charger. Pointedly, Jess realized that it was the first time he'd ever owned a car that he took some pride in. It had been a "deal" via Anthony, part birthday and part homecoming, a call from his past to that shady garage in Brooklyn.

The topics were closely linked to one another. It was unavoidable, he began to think about Leaha. She still sent him letters sometimes, always arriving a month after she had posted them. Paris had been daunting at first, she'd told him, but not so different from New York. Jess had sent her passages of thing's he'd written, remembering to mail a copy of the zine that Truncheon put together every month. They were friendly, civil, but Jess was realistic about the fact that they had the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean between them.

Rory, Leaha, Evan.

Jess.

That's when he remembered why exit signs had seemed so fascinating.

--

The façade of Stars Hollow High School appeared dewy and fog-like as Jess pulled up across the street from it's entrance, cutting the engine of his Charger in a parking space next to the Dinner that had been his home for close to two years. Sunlight peaked shyly through the flat, clouded sky at unclosed corners, pinpricks glaring at the seams. Jess stared at the deserted school with an unsurprising feeling of indifference; education had never been a pressing influence on his memories of teenage life. But, for the benefit of nostalgia, he allowed himself to dwell on the last two years of his high school experience.

He hadn't spent much time there for the most part, the classes themselves had seemed belittling and redundant—a real waste. His history teacher was one of those pompous Super-Christians who sent him disapproving looks from his podium. English class had been a joke. Jess knew more about literature than both his Junior and Senior teachers combined. He'd found chemistry bleak at best with its unnecessary emphasis on memorization instead of actual theory. Why do the work if you didn't know what it signified?

The only class he had routinely shown up for was math. He was never judged or criticized by the frank, cut and dry women who scribbled equations on chalkboards with their stout fingers and blunt haircuts. He was never forced him to talk about dead politicians or the fusion of helium and hydrogen when he was in Algebra II or pre-calculus.

Sometimes math lectures had sounded more like life lessons. He soaked it up while Mrs. Peedin gave notes on variables and extraneous solutions. With all the talk of problems with answers that appeared correct but proved wrong when you worked them back in, Jess decided to do a bit of evaluation on his own. It was easy to spread a novel across his lap while his attention waned and shifted from matrices and quadratic equations to Salinger and Tolstoy. Mrs. Peedin didn't make any quips about his schoolwork when he stared down at his books and away from her note taking; the marks he received on tests spoke for themselves.

Jess opened his car door in a sweep of locks and handles, leaning over the center console to grab the army-green duffle he'd carelessly thrown in the passenger seat. The image of Luke's plaid-happy flannel shirt could be seen bustling about the dinner as its wearer served food and took orders.

Yeah, Jess calculated, it didn't feel so bad to be home.

--

"How long are you staying?" Luke said, his back to the twenty-four-year-old currently seated at his kitchen table. Jess had abandoned his bag on the couch earlier in favor of a mug of coffee while Luke busied himself at the stove.

"Not too long. I've got that opening thing soon and Nick had a hemorrhage when I told him I'd have to leave for a couple days." He took a swig of the highly caffeinated substance. "I'm kind of glad that I've got an excuse to leave though. I mean, you can only take so much of suicidal writers and bills that you have no money to pay for and falling asleep at three o'clock in the morning and wanting to rip out your own hair."

"Well we wouldn't want to subject you to anything that would result in hair-pulling," Luke replied dryly.

"Yeah," Jess sighed. "Because you know how much I value my good looks."

Luke repressed a snort, but only barely. Jess did nothing to hide the lopsided smirk that adorned his angular features as Luke joined him at the table, letting the substance on the burner set to simmer.

"You know, next time you tell me something's coming up 'soon' I'll take it a bit more literally." Jess leaned back in his chair, eyeing his uncle across the scrubbed, wooden table, awaiting an explanation.

Luke suppressed a sarcastic remark with mild difficulty, focusing on the fact that his favorite relative was seated across from him.

"I'm glad you're here Jess," the older of the two men said with a sincere quality to his voice.

Jess made an off-hand gesture. "It's not a big deal. I told you already, I want to be here for this." He held his gaze firmly to emphasize the point he was trying to get across.

"So when's your opening?" Luke asked, diverting the subject.

"In about . . . three weeks? Yeah, less than a month left."

"Stressful?"

"More so in the beginning," Jess answered. "By now there's not much left to do except some last minute things. At first it felt a lot more overwhelming."

Luke nodded. "You feel nervous?"

Jess looked at his uncle incredulously. "Shouldn't I be asking you that question?"

For a moment both men forgot the impending change that would be occurring for both of them. It was the kind of moment that Jess tried to hold on to but eventually abandoned. Some things were better left as footnotes.

--

"Remind me again why I agreed to come to this?" Jess questioned with genuine curiosity as he walked alongside Luke and April in the direction of the Gilmore residence.

"Because you'll have every opportunity to sneak out the back door after the initial introductions?" April supplied, a little unsure if the question was open to multiple answers.

Jess nodded in acknowledgement. "This is true," he mused. "But the introductions are always the worst part."

"How can it be the worst part?" Luke asked. "You know everyone already."

The younger man's posture remained neutral while his voice took on a somewhat different tone. "I know," he replied darkly. "What are you going to say? 'Hey, remember my nephew Jess? Of course you remember him, he was the one that created a fake murder scene and switched all the children's videos with porn and stole every baseball within a ten-mile radius of Stars Hollow High School. Yeah, he's here to visit'?"

"So you _did_ steal all those baseballs!" Luke said wondrously. "The whole time I thought your principal had it wrong, but you really—hey, where'd you put over four-hundred baseballs without me finding them?"

"They're behind the paneling in the bathroom—consider it just a little extra insulation." The mischievous glint in Jess's eyes was unmistakable; Luke grinned, April rolled her eyes.

"What's the party for?" April asked.

"It's kind of like an engagement/wedding party, I don't know, something less formal than the rehearsal dinner . . . it wasn't my idea." Luke evaded unsuccessfully. Jess couldn't make out the redness of his uncles ears in the sharply sweet fall evening but the twinge of bashfulness could be heard in his voice. Jess held his gaze forward, a crooked smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

--

At least half the town's residents were arriving and socializing at the home of the future nuptials. Sookie had prepared a kitchen full of food while Lane was busy selecting the music. Mrs. Patty had already launched into one of her stories about Broadway and some deceased Great that she had met. The party was beginning to pick up, but Rory couldn't find it within herself to join them.

The back door had never looked so friendly. She slipped outside shortly after emerging from her bedroom.

It was cowardly, something she was reluctant to acknowledge but knew to be the truth. There had been a time, however brief, when Rory had gloried in the party scene: planning events, going out to bars, organizing functions, attending meetings with the DAR and dinners with politicians and businessmen. But now, now that the only thing she had to face was a house full of people she had known all her life, the idea of talking and showing her face made the floor of her stomach feel like it was laced with needles.

After college Rory had made her escape. All the forced social climbing had come to a screeching halt after Logan's proposal. She had been silently elated with that development. Her time in the past year had been spent reading to her hearts content, revisiting all the stories that had given her so much excitement before she surrendered to that other life.

And now she was hiding on her back porch, sleepy and a bit unsure but slightly warmed by the room temperature beer in her hand; drinking alone, the bottle like a flashy Christmas decoration. It was cool at the back of her house in her mother's flowery lawn chair with a pulp of a paperback teetering off the exposed skin of her knee. Pearly peach skin, smooth and hairless like an infants cheek.

The back door opened in a quick rush of light, voices, and music. Rory's doll head lolled on her creamy shoulders, swivel, slick, her eyes were pools of jeweled watercolors magnetized to his figure.

She flipped her hair behind her shoulder while Jess gauged her reaction from the doorway.

Like a scene from a daytime soap opera, that's the allusion she was drawn to, the slight bewildered pause he gave after entering her little hidden set up. But it only accounted for a few moments that she chalked up to chance and the unexpected surprise of seeing her—Rory—excommunicating herself however temporarily from the party that was being thrown for Stars Hollow's favorite couple.

"Hey," Jess recovered. "Do you mind if I . . .?" He gestured toward the unoccupied chair alongside her own.

"Oh yeah, go ahead." She was a little bit dazed but she hid it well. "It's good to see you. I didn't think you'd be here." Rory babbled. He flashed her a half-smile.

"I wasn't planning on coming but Luke thought I should make an appearance. You caught me, actually. I was trying to sneak out undetected." He joked, eyes dark from the smoky back porch light.

"Yeah, I just wanted to get somewhere quiet. I drove in late last night and I've been busy all day helping mom out with the wedding . . . " Rory trailed off, taking a sip of her beer a bit more delicately than what any other woman would have done.

"Not really up to a party, huh." He started.

Rory nodded, confirming his answer.

"Did you want a drink or something? I'm being rude, should have asked you earlier." She offered nervously. Seeing Jess in person was making her thoughts slippery and warm. Or maybe it was just the alcohol.

"No, I'm not drinking tonight. There's nothing worse than that one relative that always gets wasted their first night in town."

"Oh yeah, I've got one of those. My great aunt Sabrina, she's this seventy-year-old widow who wails away on Long Island Iced Tea every time my grandparents invite her to visit. Which is like, once every six years." She said comically.

The faintly dying bulb lit up the knowing expression that animated Jess's features. He leaned farther back in his chair.

"You have a cruel family, Gilmore. I don't know if I should be a part of it."

Rory blanched. "Eww, I can't believe you brought that up. I was hoping that no one would remind me." She gave a silent shudder.

Jess snickered. "What, ashamed of your new family, cousin?"

She lightly punched his arm. "Can it."

"Well at least that's better than Luke's usual comeback, 'don't be a smart ass,' very original, by the way." He quipped.

Rory rolled her eyes in false annoyance. Jess saw the similarities between Rory's actions and the ones he'd observed in April perhaps a half hour before. There was something about them that felt very much alike.

Both Rory and Jess turned towards the door when they heard the sound of unknowing voices about to intrude. They rose in seamless unison, dashing off around the corner of the house, hidden.

"That would have been an awkward explanation," Jess whispered to her in the near darkness.

Rory's eyes were wide with the thrill of awareness. They both stood, tense and struggling not to be heard by the oblivious partygoers. Careful not to be sensed by someone other than Jess, Rory leaned closer to him and whispered in his ear, "Lets bail."

--

"So I'm guessing that congratulations are in order." Jess looked over at Rory, her pink mouth soft and flower-like.

She gave him a funny look. "For what?"

Jess leaned back a bit more casually on the park bench they were currently occupying, keeping his face straight. "What do you mean 'for what?' How's it feel to be Lorelai's chosen maid of honor?"

Rory blushed, but it was hidden in the subtle glow of evening. "Shouldn't I be the one congratulating you, best man?" She teased.

Jess smirked. "Yeah, but the question here is how they got so short on men."

"And for Luke's bachelor party? What are you going to do?"

Jess peered slyly at her. "Why? Planning on outdoing me?"

Her cheeks flared. "No. I know better than to try to outdo you. I haven't got the skill or the imagination."

The air hung with playfulness as they kept up the banter, a polite distraction from the searing tug of chemical reactions that Rory had felt a few moments before. The instant when she had curled her searching fingers around the firm curve of his shoulder, her lips pressed to the shell of his ear—she had felt bolder in the dark covering of nightfall, doing what felt natural instead of what looked right.

Alone with Jess, she was beginning to slowly loose her mind.

It was only now after experiencing and calculating each sensation some three years ago that Rory was able to identify the rushing slickness that made her thighs run together almost painfully, leaving a delicious raw sensation bubbling against her skin. Her knees stuck out a little oddly, weak, falling subject to the looseness that pulsated through the parts of her body that she had never exposed to him. Her eyelids were heavy with the perfume of fabricated memory; implying that her imagination wasn't up to par was an outright lie.

Because she _had_ imagined it, wondering late at night in her little girl bed, the virgin fantasies that stemmed from seventeen years of inexperience. When she had crawled into bed after getting caught with Dean, Rory had wondered—her mind simmering with regret—if it had been Jess, would he have done it differently? When she tossed and turned next to a drunken Logan, a little sick and a little bit vengeful, she had wondered—would Jess cheat on her the way Logan had? And then again, in her childhood bedroom with its cheery walls and faded patchwork quilt, she was dreaming up all the things that she wanted him to do to her. Unashamedly, in the least delicate way possible.

She wanted to feel his hair tickling her neck, his fingers in her mouth, to see the flecks of gold in his eyes as he hovered above her, to feel the rough scrape of his jaw on her inner thigh—making it so raw that it hurt to pee.

So she crossed her legs, squirmed a little, and accepted his offer to buy her ice cream.

**A/N:** _I'm going to be ridiculously busy in the coming weeks because I have three projects to tackle before I can really focus on the writing so I wanted to go ahead and post this chapter. School's been a kick in the pants lately with the four page paper on the Fibonacci Sequence and the Ancient Norse Mythology project and the freakishly long book report on Ian McEwan's Atonement . . . great book by the way, you guys should definitely read it. So, review to make me feel better? Check out some of my other fics/one shots? I will be eternally grateful._


	9. Get Yours Get Mine

**Title:** _Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started: **_9-19-07_

**Date Finished:** _10-17-07_

**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Gilmore Girls. All of this belongs to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the folks at the WB._

**Summary:** _It was like staring down the barrel of a gun or over the edge of some great height. The expanse is so broad yet totally singular; a cliff, a bullet, a face. Books and wit would never write the ending for her. Future Fic, Literati_

**A/N:** _This chapter is pretty much all about the wedding. However, it is not a filler. There will be a lot of Jess/Rory interaction in the coming chapters (major hint). Reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Nine: Get Yours Get Mine**

Connecticut seemed to have lost much of it's color since the last time he'd been there, some nameless visit a few months prior to see Liz and Luke and to take a break from New York. His limited traveling in the past year had brought him to the same places for the same general reasons. He didn't mind the visits; it was nice to have the occasional conversation that didn't revolve around works of literature or the New York music scene. Jess took comfort in the mundane and the Real World that he got to experience when he was there; even if most of the experiences he gained came to him through others lives, captured vicariously.

It was nice, this living through people. It was like crying after a good book or manipulating the moods of his characters.

The walls of Stars Hollow Books seemed a little more muted than usual, the stacks held more shadows than he remembered, like turning a dial on the color scale. The books sighed on their shelves as wind tickled the leaves on the front walk, scattering colors–burgundy, amber, rust, gold–all of them drained by the steel-gray sidewalk.

It was a cliché, a trap that writers and artists squared themselves into despite all their creativity. The idea that, for creativity to flourish, chronic pain was necessary. Like poverty or sexual abuse was a gift. _All your guilt, your disabilities and illnesses, they can give real perspective. _Jess mulled over that particular corner of philosophy as he browsed the stores eclectic selection. Well, he concluded, if that were the case then life had been truly generous with its misfortunes.

This statement withheld its credibility as he challenged it against the passing authors. Poe, Bronte, Wilde, Proust; how many of them had died horrible deaths, lived shitty lives, written some of the greatest works of all time? Would people compare him to Burroughs or Vonnegut or even Kerouac one day? His name in lecture halls, books scribbled in and left crumpled on park benches and in subway seats? Legend. Icon. Indecipherable. Immortal.

Jess made sure to leave Andrew a few more cases of his novel on his way out.

--

April was, for a science wired fifteen-year-old, a damn good writer.

"You're like, the next Suzana Kayson or something. You should write more about what you're thinking. You're really getting into this internal dialogue . . ."

The awkward brunette twitched in her ice blue sweater, her identically tawny eyes trained on Jess's expressions as he read through the warm ups she had started but never finished in her Creative Writing class.

"Who's Suzana Kayson?"

Jess didn't even look up from the notes he was filling her margins with. "This writer woman. You'll notice that all of my conversational references have something to do with literature, or dead comedians, or movies from the eighties, or children's holiday figures that in no way exist. But the hook about Kayson is that she spent two years in a mental institution. Have you ever seen that Winona Ryder flick, you know, _Girl Interrupted_?"

His eyes flicked up for a brief second to check that she had comprehended everything he'd just said. Jess wasn't one for rambling, or repeating himself.

"No, I haven't seen it. Is it any good?"

He shrugged. "The movie is depressing. But the memoir is fairly intelligent. You write about patterns and thought process the same way she does. It's uncanny."

April's ears began to take on the color of tomatoes in her mixture of flattery and embarrassment. Jess saw this but made no comment on it. She really was a Danes underneath all that brainiac sugarcoating.

Jess set his pen aside, rolling the cap between his nimble fingers in contemplation.

"Your spelling is impeccable, especially for a hand-written composition. You could use a little more work on the grammar though, misplaced modifiers and that sort of thing. Keep writing these little three page philosophy blurbs here and you could really have something."

He closed the cover on her notebook and returned it to April, his corrections and comments like a bounding advantage for an armature writer.

"Thanks Jess," April slid her nails along the spirals edge in nervousness. She wasn't used to people reading her compositions.

He made a non-committal gesture. "You're writing's really good, for a fifteen-year-old. Keep is up."

"I can never finish a story. They all kind of end after a few pages because I don't really know what to do with them," She admitted sheepishly.

Jess shrugged. "Set a daily minimum for yourself. Like, a couple pages a day, just to get used to writing on a schedule. Some people write outlines for their stories but I've never really done that. It just seems like a bunch of wasted time that you could have used to actually write your story."

She nodded, seeing his point.

"Is this something you'd like to do long term? Luke mentioned that your interested in science . . . " Jess trailed off.

"I want to go to MIT," April began to explain. "I'm really interested in genetic research, gene therapy, genetic disorders, basically really boring stuff." She flushed.

It was at that moment that Jess was strongly reminded of Rory and her confessions of future ambitions all those years ago. Foreign correspondent, Geneticist; in a way they really weren't so different.

"No, that's actually sounds really cool. Not many people know what they want to be when they're fifteen. I sure as hell didn't. Not when I was fifteen, or eighteen, or twenty." He chuckled at his own words.

"You didn't always want to be a writer?" She questioned, shifting her position on the floor of Luke's apartment to a more upright stance.

Jess fingered the edge of his uncles aging leather couch in a lazy manner. "Definitely not. For the majority of my young adult life I didn't want to be anything. I didn't plan to write a book, you know." He gave her a very pointed look before laying with his back flat against the couch cushions, April seated and attentive, his audience.

"When people need money they do insane things," He said sleepily.

"Is that why you decided to write a book? Because you needed money?"

He blinked. "Not really. I didn't make hardly any money off of it but I needed to feel legitimized. It worked."

"Are you going to write other books?" April was curious. She had spent very little of her life around men and Jess was an easy specimen to examine.

"Yeah, probably." He wasn't with her. Maybe physically, but his mind had begun to roam elsewhere.

Living up to her insightful reputation, April took the hint and left, taking her notebook with her.

--

_People say that love is what makes life worth experiencing, like your independent existence will never be enough to sustain you, not in your lifetime or the next. But what defines love? And what's the difference between perceived love and actual love? If you think you're in love does that make it true? Can it be synthetically produced, a cocktail of hormones and chemicals, a shot of serotonin for every kiss or a great fuck? I've always believed that love is what you make it._

_Do we deserve to get the things we want? And why do we want them? Because they're a challenge, or because we all are destined to want the same things–happiness, love, a contented outlook. By getting what we want do we show a secular branch of weakness? By not becoming all that we could be, does that make us cowards?_

_Happiness mutilates creativity the same way words like Trust and Commitment can abolish a relationship._

_My relationship with Evan is proof of this._

_Nick was right, despite his assumptions, he gave me the basic gist of what I already know._

_I don't want her, but it's painfully obvious that I should. This is the way nearly all of my relationships have panned out since I was nineteen. You can't force happiness, or a connection–even if you could see yourself settling for what you already have–it isn't enough. I am not in love with Evan. I do not want to share my life with her. But, at the same time, I don't want to forfeit everything I've accomplished in the past six years for Rory, who will never want me in the same way I want her._

_She keeps me in boxes in her closet or the margins of her books, my phone number saved somewhere in the back of her cell phone. But she will never tag my name onto sentences about Trust or Love or Commitment because I'm–not–what–she–wants._

_And that is it. That's all I can say._

--

Rory sat with her feet tucked underneath her, knees bent, chin turned with her head lolled to the side as it rested against the overstuffed chair-back. She couldn't reach her nose with her shoulder while she sat in that way and the vulnerability of that particular facial feature was beginning to bother her. Little tufts of fuzz and lint clung to the baby-yellow fabric that hung close to the pine wood floor. Dust Bunnies. How charming.

"Hey kid," Lorelai shuffled into the room, pulling her ebony curls up into a glossy black bun with a rubber band. "Did you fall asleep?"

The TV was on, Rhet Butler was kissing Scarlet O'Hara with the sound turned low. Rory hit mute after she finished digging for the remote.

She yawned. "Where did you go?"

Lorelai grinned, holding up a take-out bag that had been resting on the floor. "I stopped by Al's. He gave me a fifteen percent discount for buying the Moroccan."

"The additional perks of being a bride." Rory scooped up the second take-out bag and joined her mother on the couch.

"So, _Gone With The Wind_, care to explain that?" Lorelai asked through a mouth full of food.

"Care to explain why Luke isn't eating with us?" Rory countered.

"Because, see, we're doing this sentimental thing where we're having dinner with out separate families for the last time before the wedding."

Whilst chewing chicken, Rory said. "Things won't be so different."

"Yeah, for you. You're all grown up with your own apartment while I, on the other hand, will have Luke and April _officially_ move in." She elaborated.

"This is true," Rory nodded in agreement. "But you like April, and you love Luke, no problems there."

Lorelai sighed, leaning her head back contentedly. "I know."

"So, are you prepared for tomorrow night?" Rory chuckled.

"Oh yeah, I've got my stomach-pumping facial expressions _down._"

"Ha, ha." She laughed darkly. "But you forget, I used to work for the DAR, and those ladies can really throw it down."

The older woman groaned. "Ugh, don't remind me. I'm just glad that the whole wedding is completely Gilmore-Family free."

"Tell that to grandma. She still wants to get her hands on your dress, and the menus, seating chart, flower arrangements, guest list . . ." Rory counted off on her fingers.

"If it were up to mom she'd marry me off like my father was the last Russian Czar."

"The white horses _would_ be cute, you know, if you were having the wedding in like, December."

"Yeah, if we lived in Narnia maybe." Lorelai commented sarcastically.

Rory glared over her fork but remained silent.

Conversation dwindled as the two Gilmores indulged in Al's Moroccan take out, until Lorelai voiced one of her growing curiosities.

"So, how are you with . . . everything that's been happening recently?" Lorelai's powder blue eyes flicked to her daughters face while she broached her question.

"What, you mean the wedding? Mom, you know that I'm totally over the moon about this–you and Luke–"

"I know, I know. What I meant was everything else. Like, being so far away and getting a new job and seeing people you haven't seen in years . . ."

"Are you trying to ask me anything in particular?" Rory questioned.

Her mother slumped down in her chair, caring yet exasperated. "I just wanted to know if you were ok with Jess being here."

"Yeah, I'm fine."

A pause.

"I mean, why _shouldn't_ I be find? Jess and I talk, why does this have to be such a big deal?"

"Rory, it's not a big deal, not if you say it isn't. But I've just been wondering what's going on between you two. You've seen each other, right?"

"We went out for ice cream."

"When?"

"Uh, during that party the other night. We walked around and talked some."

The elder Gilmore arched an eyebrow. "So?"

"So what?"

"So, has anything happened? Anymore surprise 'I love you's' or gift-wrapped novels?"

"No, nothing. It's like, like he isn't even interested. At least not in that way. "

"Do you want him to be?" Her mother tried to ask nonchalantly, but Lorelai's curiosity was evident.

Rory didn't say anything in response.

"You know, it's not a bad thing to want to be with Jess. He's completely different from how he used to be."

"Oh, trust me, I know."

"It seems like we always have this conversation, doesn't it?"

Rory shifted. "Yeah, sort of."

There was an extended silence, broken by Lorelai. "You want him."

The younger girl shook her head. "It doesn't matter."

Lorelai gaped. "You've got to be kidding. Rory, he's right here–practically two block away! Not across the country or in another state, for christsake, you both live in the _same city_–"

"And _obviously _none of that matters to him or he would have done something by now." She huffed, food forgotten.

"Rory," Lorelai emphasized, "you're never going to know what you're missing if you don't even attempt to find out."

"Where is this coming from? You don't even _like_ Jess."

"It's not about what I like or what I want or what your grandparents want or what Stars Hollow wants–this is about you."

Rory sniffed. "So what do I do?"

"You ask him out, or drag him into your bedroom, or a car or even a spacious closet–I don't care what you do as long as you're not miserable like you are now."

She tucked her hair behind her ears self-consciously. "But what if he doesn't want me?"

Lorelai looked at her daughter, a knowing smile spreading across her face.

She smirked. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you."

--

"Oh, Jesus, my head is killing me."

Luke sat up in bed with the heel of his hand pressed into his eyes. He made a sound that was halfway between a moan of pain and an outburst of disgust at the sight of Jess, who had just sat up from his makeshift bed–which was really the living room couch–seemingly unaffected.

"And look at you," he said grumpily, "fresh as a damn daisy."

Jess smirked. "Fortunately, I don't get hang overs, old man." He vaulted over the coffee table in an attempt to reach the kitchen. Jess retrieved a bottle of aspirin and poured a glass of water for Luke, who took it begrudgingly.

The younger of the two men plopped down on the end of his uncle's bed, falling to rest on his back with his gaze trained on the ceiling.

"So."

Luke grunted in response. "Yeah?"

"You had fun last night."

He cleared his throat. "Ah, ehm, well . . . "

"Admit it, you had _fun._" Jess teased in a singsong voice, arching his back as he stretched out on the mattress.

"I'm going to have fun when you go back to your job and stop mooching off me."

"Jeez, you really are irritable when you have a hangover. And it doesn't count as mooching when the person is invited. Besides, you like having me here."

"That remains to be seen."

"Oh, I just got burned."

"You're giving me a headache."

"Well at least it came in the same package as a kick-ass bachelor party."

Luke downed the glass of water to go with his aspirin as he wandered into the bathroom. Jess made no move to follow his uncle, they'd bickered enough for one morning.

"How do you think Lorelai's party went?" Luke called over the dull buzz of his electric razor. Jess began to dress himself for the day.

"Strippers, the really nasty kind, with sores and track marks."

"That's disgusting."

"You didn't think it was so disgusting last night, after four beers." He smirked, fastening up the last few buttons on his white collared shirt.

"The ones we saw last night weren't . . . you know . . . "

"Trash?" Jess supplied.

"Yeah," Luke agreed.

Running his fingers through his hair, Jess proceeded to dig through the bottomless pit that was his duffle bag in search of hair jell. "That's usually the case with burlesque. More class, different body type, I thought you'd like it."

"I'll chalk it up to a pleasant surprise," he said, finishing the buttons on his flannel shirt.

"You gonna pick up April?" Jess asked, taking Luke's place in the bathroom.

"Yeah, thought it'd be better for her to stay with a friend last night, considering both Lorelai and myself . . . "

"Were intoxicated," Jess finished.

"Yeah, that."

--

"Have you seen my–"

"Got it right here."

Rory held up her mother's silver charm bracelet and began fastening the treasured piece of jewelry to her wrist.

"Ah, what would I do without my Rory?" Lorelai cooed in appreciation.

"I guess that's yet another thing Luke is going to have to help you with. Sorry."

"I guess that's a change I'm willing to make," Her mother said brightly.

"I should hope so. It'd be kind of late in the game, you know, if you were having doubts . . . " Rory trailed off.

"No, I'm really ok with this. I don't feel nervous at all."

"Not even a tinny, little bit?" Rory asked.

"I'm really ready to get married," Lorelai said confidently, fluffing her hair.

Smiling, Rory stood next to her mother in the mirror. For the two of them it would be one of the last times before the wedding.

"I'm happy for you."

She squeezed her hand and the moment passed as Rory turned to grab her purse and keys on the table by the door. Lorelai was a few steps behind her as they left for the wedding rehearsal.

It was one of those crystalline October nights that New England was famous for, with the sky a lovely shade of mauve and the leaves a fluttering cloud of orange and rouge. The curving line of yellow that guided them down the newly paved road stretched like a ribbon of gold, reminding Rory of presents and bows.

It was a quick run through, everyone falling into place seamlessly. Lorelai herself had decorated the Inn expertly with modest but classy flower arrangements and elegant table settings. The rehearsal was brief, leaving a generous amount of time for a sit-down dinner prepared by Sookie especially for the occasion.

The dinner guests included the bridesmaids and groomsmen along with the Pastor, Lorelai's parents, the couple themselves, and Liz as well as Doula. The dinning room had been set up with one long table for the entire party, complete with place cards.

On her way to her seat Rory switched her card with Pastor Tom's, making a slight rearrangement that would most likely benefit her as the evening went on. After all, she'd rather spend this particular dinner with Jess as opposed to her grandmother.

The switch went unnoticed as everyone cheerfully migrated to the dinning room and began dinner. Rory crossed and uncrossed her legs in a nervous twitch while she made quiet conversation with Jess, on her left, and April, on her right.

April was asking for help with her hair before the wedding tomorrow, it took Rory a moment to agree; she'd been sucking on one of the ice cubes in her tea.

"Oh sure April, you can get ready with me and my mom."

Both girls fell to amused silence while they watched Jess squirm as he was faced with the prospect of Liz, who had him trapped into a conversation.

"I'm so glad you cut that hair of yours, you had it so long before . . . "

"Thought it'd be cleaner this way," Jess replied in an effort to be polite.

"And you won't even stay a few days to see your poor mother? You know I'm so lonely with T. J. Doing that job in Massachusetts. With the Renaissance season over I haven't got anything to do with myself, especially with Doula in pre-school, you should visit more often."

Jess laughed deep in his throat. "At least I know I'm missed." He then proceeded to focus on his dinner while Liz started up a conversation with Sookie on the best way to baste a turkey.

Rory hid her giggle with her napkin while Jess sent her a look. She ignored it.

"Aww, your mommy misses you," Rory teased.

He blanched. "Don't laugh. You're the one who's giving up a parent tomorrow. I'm surprised you aren't more upset."

"Me? Upset? No way. It's not like anything's going to change." She countered.

"You say that now," Jess muttered darkly. "Just wait, it gets worse."

"What gets worse?"

"This," He gestured to the table of slightly tipsy adults. "You'll change your mind once you have to go to one of my mothers crazy Thanksgiving dinners." He looked at her knowingly. "Just wait and see."

"Have you forgotten that I've got a crazy family too? I mean, you have been formally introduced to Emily Gilmore."

"Hmm," He drank from his glass. "Different kind of weird."

"I'll say," April grumbled between mouthfuls of food.

--

It was like floating, being led through the parted sea of people and straight-backed chairs on her way to the altar. She looked down at her arm locked to his, and flew.

They parted, taking separate places in support of their favorite family members. Jess stood next to Luke, classically handsome in his dark suit and tie, while Rory took her place as the Maid of Honor, the deep V of her royal blue bridesmaids dress a shining pool of her milky skin.

Music played, heads turned, lungs constricted, as Lorelai began her walk down the isle.

--

**A/N:** _Like I said, much more Jess/Rory in chapter ten, I promise. Don't forget to review :D_


	10. Drag Queens and Saxophone Players

**Title:** _Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started:** _10-17-07_

**Date Finished:** _11-15-07_

**Summary:** _He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:**_ If you check out my profile I've posted some pictures that I used when writing Pulse, kind of like a visual aid. Anyways, these next three chapters are really going to deliver. Reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Ten: Drag Queens and Saxophone Players**

"What a beautiful wedding," Emily said affectionately, clutching her drink.

"It reminds me of when I married my third husband," Patty commented dreamily.

Babette began to hike up her panty hose under the table. "And did ya see that dress? Sexy, Lorelai's the only broad I know that could have pulled off a sexy wedding dress."

To this remark Emily merely laughed and got a refill for her sidecar.

Rory, who was sitting some two tables away, smiled into her glass of white wine and scooted a little closer to Jess.

"Are you happy? _I'm_ happy, really happy. In fact, if they had a prize for happiness I'd loose–but to mom and Luke because they so deserve to win."

Jess smirked at her tipsy rambling and took her wine glass out of her hand. "You're done Gilmore, I think you head just can't handle all that booze." He laughed.

Rory laid one of her then empty hands on Jess's knee and leaned towards him, close. "Won't you dance with me Jess? Please? You look very nice by the way . . . "

He faked deliberating while Rory gave him her best Bambi impersonation.

"You owe me," she taunted.

"How do you figure?"

"You promised to take me to prom, remember? I had gone out and bought new shoes and picked out a dress." She played with the lapel of his jacket, smiling, blushing, teasing.

"Was it as nice as the one you're wearing now?"

"Definitely not." Rory replied, dragging Jess out of his char and onto the dance floor.

--

Someone had left the front porch light on. It was nice, considering how her brain was so foggy with sleep. The warm leather interior of Jess's '69 Dodge Charger felt smooth against her cheek, like a glove cupping her face.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. "Rory," her eyes cracked open. "Hey, you awake?"

Her reply was mumbled incoherently; she arched her back in a cat-like manner in an attempt to rouse herself.

"Jess," she rubbed her eyes while unbuckling her seatbelt. "How long was I asleep?"

He went around and opened the door for her. "About fifteen minutes. Twenty tops."

The pair began their stroll up Rory's front steps, stopping in front of her door, both looking a little worse for wear. The top button of Jess's shirt had come undone along with the knot of his tie. With his shirt untucked and hair wildly disheveled, he looked like a tired little kid ready to crawl into bed. Rory removed his jacket from her shoulders, returning it reluctantly. It had smelled so good, like cinnamon and the faint presence of tobacco.

She ran her fingers through her loose chestnut hair, trying to hide the pink tint to her cheeks as she adjusted the strap of her royal blue brides maids dress.

"Thanks for giving me a ride home," she couldn't stop looking at him, couldn't tear her eyes away from the flat planes of muscle peaking out of the V of his shirt, the definite line of his jaw.

"Anytime," Jess said, softly, his voice like a beat of staccato pressure on her throat.

It was almost like magnetism, two poles of energy pulling them towards each other through a waist-centered pulse. She could feel the pooling heat that had begun to gather between her legs, pacing faster as their hips brushed against each other. Her head was tilted slightly upward, not enough to hurt her neck, but just enough so that their lips could meet warmly, a vacuum of tension between them.

His arms held her around her waist, keeping her body against his as their mouths continued their exploration. It was like an exchange, a transfer of lower lip to upper lip and back again. Her hands wound themselves into his forest of wild, untamable curls, her arms held loosely around his neck. She felt his tongue, hot and soft, stroking the smooth outside of her lower lip, easing her open with the precision of a man who had seduced countless women.

Her face felt heated, flushed. The muscles around her mouth loosened, giving Jess clear control of the situation. He angled her hips–her supple waist beneath his hands–against the doorframe, applying a gentle, stirring pleasure. He moved to kiss her neck. All of his movements were expected, free, open. She objected to nothing.

His lips brushed her cheek, the corner of her mouth. They disconnected while he watched her, placid.

Quietly, Rory peered up at him through chocolate colored lashes, resting her palm on his chest.

"Will you stay with me?"

The words were out of her mouth before she could swallow them. In the smoky glow of the porch light she was unable to read Jess's subtle expression.

He looked down while he spoke. "I shouldn't."

However dark, Rory's disappointment didn't escape his gaze.

"When did you get responsible," he ran the pad of his thumb over her cheek. It was a gesture that–if done to him–would have caused him to blanch and pull away. But Rory eased into the feeling of his hand on her face, touching her skin.

"Hey," he tapped on a sensitive spot on her lower back; an area that he knew almost instinctively from years prior. "Let me take you out sometime. Come to dinner with me. You'll have fun, I promise."

He didn't ask, she noticed. A tinny part of her leaped and settled.

She brought her hand up to cover his own. Looking up, she asked, "When?"

"Tuesday. Seven o'clock on Tuesday night. If you'll be back by then."

She smiled; a small, genuine, rosy smile. "Alright."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

--

Rory stood in front of her closet, bathrobe wrapped around her shoulders and synched at the waist. After nearly fifteen minutes of hopelessly deliberating she sighed in defeat, retreating to the night stand to make a desperate phone call.

"Mom, what do I wear?"

Far across the Atlantic ocean, on her honeymoon, Lorelai responded to the call of her daughter.

"Well hello to you, too." The older woman replied from her hotel room in Spain.

"I'm sorry, how's the honeymoon going? Did I interrupt a potentially intimate moment?"

"Actually, it's fairly early here. Luke is still asleep, if you can believe it."

"No details, please. Spare me."

"You're spared. Now, what is this clothing crisis you speak of?" Lorelai paused to take a sip from her coffee mug while Rory formulated a linear explanation for her current dilemma.

Frank but declarative seemed to be the simplest tactic. She licked her lips absently and began to speak. "I'm going out with Jess tonight, to dinner, and I don't have any idea what to wear."

With thousands of miles between them, Rory could still hear the thunderously triumphant smirk that was undoubtedly spreading across her mother's face.

"You're going on a date, huh? Mind telling me a bit more here, I'm practically starving for information."

Rory lay with her back flat on the mattress, phone held between her cheek and her hand lazily. "He gave me a ride home after the wedding reception, and he asked me out. It wasn't a big thing. He called again on Monday to see if I was still ok to go–and now I have twenty minutes to decide what to wear." She finished, exasperated.

"Well, what do you think Jess will be wearing?" Lorelai asked, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Something smart," Rory mocked. "What does that matter?"

"Sometimes it's better to try to match your wardrobe with whatever you think your date will be wearing."

"I'm am not Mrs. Cleo, ok, I can't predict–"

"The yellow skirt."

"What?"

"Go with the yellow mini-skirt. And your black sweater. And those boots that are technically mine but are in your possession."

"And black rights," Rory added, quickly throwing on the described outfit.

"Where do you think he'll take you?" Her mother asked in a girlie manner.

"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" Rory mumbled, zipping up her shoe.

"It's so cute," she teased. "You like Jess, ha, ha." Lorelai taunted.

"Stop it," Rory reprimanded, still somewhat playful. The older of the two women obliged.

"Serious question," Rory asked.

"Shoot."

"How may dates did you and Luke go on before you guys . . . " she trailed off.

"Before we what?" Lorelai questioned, distracted.

"Before you had sex," Rory clarified.

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh."

"Rory," her mother started, contemplating the best way to phrase what she was about to say.

"Yes?'

"Do you want to have sex with Jess?" She tried to say it as nonchalantly as possible, a difficult task for a mother with overwhelming humor-based tendencies.

"If I didn't I wouldn't be going out with him," Rory soberly answered, running a brush through her dark hair.

"All I'm going to say," her mother broke her words down clearly, "is, do what you want to do. You're twenty-four, you're mature enough to handle the consequences of your decisions–and if that includes giving yourself a little more time then ok, you don't have to have sex after your first date."

"And this conversation has become epically awkward," Rory sighed, running a lint roller over her clothes.

"Yeah, eh, ick." Lorelai frowned.

"Goodbye mom."

"You know, you don't have to hang up on me, I'm sure we could work something out that doesn't make us both cringe–"

"Bye!" Rory said cheerfully, turning off the phone.

--

"Where are you taking me? To one of those art-house movie theaters, or a coffee house with bad interpretive poetry? Downtown? Midtown? Or are we really going bohemian with you dragging me to some Spartan-esque studio apartment in the East Village with typewriters everywhere and a saxophone player on he corner–"

"Well aren't we full of double entendre's this evening."

Rory giggled at Jess's suggestive comment laced with literary satire. He smirked.

"Actually, I'm taking you to dinner, you art snob. And maybe _then_ we can go meet a saxophone player."

"Deal."

--

The waitress took away their then-empty bowls that had formally held French onion soup, but Rory and Jess didn't miss a beat in their conversation.

"So you're saying that she was a device? That her death was a tool to show the protagonists struggle in identifying actual love in his life?" Jess asked, spearing a circular piece of kielbasa.

"Not necessarily. I think the fact that Nell was dead gave her sympathy she wouldn't have otherwise received."

"You think her character was unsympathetic because she was a stripper?" He tried to clarify.

"Partly," Rory cleared her throat. "Novels usually follow the line where if you do something that's 'wrong' or 'abnormal' you end up paying for it. Like, if one thing goes wrong you begin this Odyssey through Hell where the girl deserves what happens to her because she went against her family or her religion." She took a breath.

Jess fingered the edge of his fork, brushing the handle. "You're right, to a degree. A lot of American writers fall into that trap. It's like, if you don't live the American Dream you become a failure, you loose complete control of your life. But I don't think Nell's character is an example of that. It doesn't seem like something Pen Jillet would do in his first novel."

Rory's eyes began to drift about the restaurant, taking in the dark woods and jewel tones, warm lighting, what Mr. Medina would have referred to as a 'novel setting.' Intelligent but not tedious; she could imagine Jess, darkly stylish and full of incite, fitting in smoothly in the back corners of New York City. It had been difficult to imagine him as part of a scene or a group when they had both lived in Stars Hollow. He had been alienated by its normalcy, it's open-armed small town sweetness. But here, now, dining around musicians and critics and native New Yorkers, he seemed to fit. She could see it in his knowing, almost lazy smile: relaxation, environmental equilibrium, confidence.

They finished dinner shortly after their dissection of _Sock,_ something that Rory had picked up out of curiosity and Jess had sought out purposefully (he had a deep-rooted interest in magicians).

She held her white coat snugly around herself as a shield against the early November chill. It was cool for fall, more so than usual. Jess walked close beside her, shortening his strides slightly to accommodate her slower pace.

"Should we be walking around here at night like this?" Rory said in reference to their stroll through Washington Square Park.

He rolled his eyes at her concern. "About the only people who'll bother us are the Drag Queens, and they won't be out for another couple of hours. That lot tends to hang out later than most."

She smiled into her shoulder as he held his arm around her waist, pressing the length of their bodies a little closer.

"How long have you been here, in New York?"

"Recently, as in now?"

"Yeah," she tilted her head a little towards his, cheeks very close to touching.

"Since June. I've worked like a maniac for the past five months."

"Poor boy," Rory took the hand that wasn't around her waist into her own, entwining their fingers.

"So, when exactly did you move here? The last bit of news I recall hearing about you was that you were traipsing around the country. "

She blushed. "I was. For about a year, actually. It was for Barack Obama's campaign. I got a job with an internet news site. I guess I kind of wandered into the city sometime around September."

He nodded. "Bet you loved that."

"Then, yes. Now it's just a bit harder."

"Don't worry, you'll find your niche."

"It's good to hear that you have total faith in me."

"What else is there? You, Nick's off-base dream analysis, and the Democratic Party. I don't need anything else."

She chuckled, laughing in a girlish way. Biting her lips to keep off the chill, Rory didn't fail to notice the gradual decline in the speed of their walk. The park was surprisingly deserted for ten o'clock, but, then again, it was a Tuesday evening.

Their walking came to a stop. "Did you ever think this would happen Rory?"

"What do you mean?"

"This. Us. All of it, but real this time."

"I don't know."

They were holding hands, ivory and olive mixing just beyond the outer rim of the streetlight.

"I never let myself think about it." Jess confessed. "I didn't want to build up any false ideals about our relationship. If you could have called it that."

She nodded. "I guess I approached the situation like an equation. Like arithmetic. I didn't realize until later that what I was dealing with was more similar to algebra."

He shook his head knowingly. "Figures. Logic turned out to be your enemy. Talk about a tragic flaw."

Pointedly, she felt the edge of his nail drag across her wrist, running along the length of her palm. She fought the urge to move, letting the tension in her hands dissipate. Moving from her arms to her shoulders, to her neck and spine. A pressing warmth tugged on something in her lower stomach.

She leaned into the shape of his body; his mouth pressed against the shell of her ear. "You ready?"

"For what?"

"This." He said simply.

He kissed her, really kissed her. It was one of those breathless deals where she just couldn't get close enough, couldn't make enough contact. And for one, blinding second she forgot how to move, how to kiss. The second passed quickly. His hands had tangled in her hair, arms around her, his tongue coaxing heat out of her mouth. With her body firmly planted against his she became aware of the physical changes she was feeling. The tension in her knees lessened while her breasts felt overly sensitive through multiple layers of clothing. She could only open her mouth–willing, her senses flooded–and run her palm across his jaw, curling over his ears and brushing against the soft, fine hairs where his haircut tapered off.

She arched up into him, strung out, soft and weak while he made shallow plays on her lips. Jess would kiss her teasingly, slipping into her mouth quickly just to repeat the action. He stroked her hair, pulling away but still holding her. He twirled a lock of her chestnut hair around his pale fingers, smiling.

"You wanna come home with me?" He asked gently, nuzzling her neck.

She bit her lip. "Maybe not tonight," she rested her hand against the flat plane of his chest.

"Want me to walk you home?" He nipped her ear playfully in encouragement.

Blushing, she asked, "Are you sure that's a good idea? I might forget the part about the actual walking."

"Oh yes, definitely. Wouldn't want to turn a pretty-little girl like you loose on the town with all the crazies out."

"Drag Queens looking pretty scary, huh?" She joked.

Jess feigned innocent seriousness, "Terrifying."

--

Cold sunlight filled Rory's living room, her coffee pot gurgling cheerfully in the kitchen. She was sprawled out on the couch, her cell phone held to her ear sleepily.

"Mom, it's seven in the morning," she yawned, adjusting her blankets.

"Not in Spain," Lorelai replied.

"Yeah," Rory grumbled. "In Spain it's seven at night. Shouldn't you be eating dinner or something?"

"And shouldn't you be too exhausted to answer the phone?" Her mother pressed.

"No."

"No? What is the reasoning behind the no?"

"It was one date."

"Meaning?" Her mother asked.

Squishing deeper into the pillows, Rory answered. "Meaning I wasn't absolutely sure that having sex would enhance the evening."

"Hm, well, you sounded pretty sure yesterday. "

Rory frowned. "I don't remember that."

Lorelai blanched at her own fib. "You're right. You were very much on the fence about the whole thing. But, personally, I thought you were going to do it anyway."

"We kissed," she tried to make her tone sound neutral, but the blush pooled through her cheeks. Rory was enormously grateful that her mother couldn't see her.

"Aww," Lorelai cooed. "That's so cute."

"And the mocking commences," Rory said darkly. "Again, I ask, shouldn't you be eating dinner or something?"

"No, I'm busy prying into your love life. Tell me, how did Jess react to the non-sex you were both having?"

"He walked me home. And we kissed some more. And then I went to bed."

"Do you know when you'll see him again?"

Rory made her way to the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee. "This afternoon, I think. He wants to show me around his bookstore before the opening on Friday."

"That's soon." Her mother commented.

"Two days is too long." Rory said between gulps of coffee. "I'd start to get all nervous and I'd overanalyze things, you know how I get."

Lorelai made a sound of agreement. "You do tend to overanalyze things."

Frowning, Rory changed the subject. "How's Luke?"

"Frustrated. Neither one of us speaks any Spanish. It creates a lot of awkwardly hilarious situations."

"Well I would love to hear about it but I have to meet my editor in an hour-and-a-half. I need to get ready."

"Go be a newspaper girl. Just brush me off on my honeymoon."

"Luckily you have Luke to occupy your time. Go get laid."

"See what a sweet little girl I have? She always looks out for her mommy, even when she's not 'getting any' as Jess would say–"

"Goodbye mom."

--

The stairway was dark, the kind of old-fashioned back entrance that had been put in 20's business and apartment buildings, boarding houses. He'd told her where to find the key (inside the loose brick with the white stripe down the front) and that maybe she'd run into Nick–his best friend and business partner–but he would be expecting her around five.

Five. Late enough for the sun to begin it's slow crawl bellow the horizon, but early enough so she wouldn't have to stay–was it still too soon?

Her mind was a pool of images, one of those frozen mountain streams that glossed over in the winter; pearly, delicate, silver and frosted with snow. She was getting flashes of Dottie and Dick, Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Catherine and Heathfliff.

What was it in her that longed to be owned? To be carried and lain down, her fingers and arms like curled pieces of parchment, reaching, being carefully smoothed down by wise hands.

The sound of her heels on the muffled stairwell, one of those therebare carpet runners down it's center, dark woods–real mahogany molding–all of it swelling together in a whirl of rich eggplant. Tinted violette. Ripples of gold lighting from the occasional uncovered window.

And there it was, the lefthand door on the third floor. Solid wood. A few steps down from Nick's apartment on the right.

All it took was just a knock on the door, one of those simple acts that would push the plot of their novella forward. The character goes through the door, the action commences. Face to face. Parry, thrust, touche.

She saw her hand go out in front of her, saw it make contact with the sanded wood surface, felt her crazy self smiling.

A wave of warmth surged through her veins, the key turned on the other side.

--

**A/N:** _Can you feel the tension? I want to know what you guys think of this chapter. Please leave a review._


	11. Lip Gloss and Black

**Title:**_ Pulse_

**Rating:**_ R_

**Date Started:** _11-17-07_

**Date Finished:** _12-25-07_

**Disclaimer**_**:**__ I don't own Gilmore Girls. It all belongs to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the folks at the WB. Chapter title comes from a song by Atreyu of the same name._

**Summary:** _He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**A/N:** _Just a reminder of the rating. Chapter eleven is one of my favorites so I hope you guys enjoy this. Reviews are always appreciated :D_

**Chapter Eleven: Lip Gloss and Black**

The first thing that caught her attention was the window. Geometrically perfect arches showing carefully cut pieces of glass; arches that rose taller than herself and came to stop somewhere below her waist. The smooth mahogany ledge was free of clutter, save a moderately full ashtray made from brass. The room was all handsome, forest green and masculine woods. Older. Leather and the soft sound of books. She felt Jess come up beside her.

"You have trees," Rory pointed to the three or so Oaks growing in the back portion of Truncheons' lot. There was just enough space for grass to grow between the buildings brick edifice and the fence that ran around the properties perimeter.

"Yeah. Sometimes Nick and I climb up there and people watch." Jess said thoughtfully. "This place is so different from anywhere I've ever lived. C'mere, let me show you the rest of the apartment."

Jess led her away from the window, past the working fireplace and the rest of his living room to a hallway that Rory hadn't seen previously.

"Check it out."

She felt her jaw slacken in shock "Oh my God."

Bookshelves lined the half-walls, tapering off where the ceiling came in at a slant on both sides. She guessed that the room had originally been an attic but it had been renovated sometime in the last fifty years. The shelves held Jess's extensive collection, volumes double stacked in some places. Rory mobbed towards the closest shelf, seemingly hypnotized.

"They're done by genre: classics, music related, social, biography . . . "

"Jess, why do you have _The Portable Jack Kerouac_ next to _Naked Lunch_?" She wondered out loud.

Jess regarded her thoughtfully. "It's the same generation. All the Beats are up there together. In fact—" he reached up to the shelf that had caused Rory's inquiry and retrieved a small, hand-sized paper back.

"I think this belongs to you."

"You still have my copy of _Howl_!"

"Obviously."

She tucked it into her back pocket with a small, playful glare.

--

The light was cast in a wide variation of colors, a deep indigo emanated from the window while golden yellow rippled around their seated figures like liquid gold. Rory's eyes were a reflecting pool of sorts, glittering in the smoky ambiance of Jess's living room.

She held her lower lip between her teeth, a habit that she sometimes preformed out of nervousness.

Jess wasn't sitting next to her. He paced, stood for moments, thinking, and resumed pacing once again.

"It won't work," he said with finality. Unseen by Jess, Rory's face became laced with visual disappointment.

"Why? Do you only let yourself have sex on certain nights of the week or something?" She jabbed, put out.

"Ha. If only you knew." He smirked. "But before I even attempt to get you into bed we need to have a little talk."

Rory crossed her arms. "About what? Please don't tell me you have HIV or something, it would totally just ruin this whole fire-light-seduction thing you've got going."

Jess snickered. In a twisted, round about sort of way she had just confessed that she wanted to sleep with him. "Fuck no. I keep myself clean, thanks. What I think we should talk about is . . . us."

"Us."

"Yes."

"Oh. Well, ok. You know, this is good. Actually, this is great. Talking. Wow. Who knew we were capable?" Rory rambled, caught off guard. He wasn't the Jess she had known in High School. It was unlike him, unlike the old him. Passing up sex to talk? It was practically unheard of in his history, until now.

"Knew I'd win you over eventually." He said lightly, stubbing out his cigarette in the nearby ashtray.

"So, is this the are-you-seeing-anyone-else conversation?" She joked, smiling, a little embarrassed.

"Yeah, I guess you could call it that." He took a seat next to her now, completely at east.

"Well, you already know he answer to that question." She explained easily.

"Do I?" He asked, his body close and facing her general direction.

She fingered the collar on his button down. "Yes. You know I'm not seeing anyone else." She let her hand glide smoothly down his chest, the corners of her mouth twitching, bordering a smile.

He pulled her a little closer, arms snug around her waist. "And you don't want to? See other people, that is."

"No." She leaned her smooth, porcelain cheek against his shoulder. "No one else."

"Good." The desire to kiss her was eating away at his judgment. He ran his hands over the soft curve of her thigh.

Her smile flickered and dissipated, eyes big and blue with color and emotion. "Do you have other girls, Jess?" She looked hopeful but close to her deep-rooted fear of his rejection; she was silent and open, waiting.

It was the possibility of being deemed unwanted. She was making herself vulnerable by exposing her feelings. "No. Nobody. I mean, I haven't really been with anyone since we started talking, not really."

"Not really." She mocked. Jess gave her a playful look.

She giggled a little but allowed him to pull her into his lap.

--

Her skirt was pushed up around her waist, the hem lifted, exposing her underwear. Jess's hand cupped her over the thin cotton.

She moved against him, trying to generate some friction. He laughed slightly, his mouth against her neck. "Hold still."

"Jess," she pulled his face down to kiss her, her fingers curling around the edge of his jaw. His tongue flicked over her teeth and the warm seam of her mouth. He pulled out and went back in, kissing her while stroking the hairless skin close to her center. She squirmed and scraped her nails against his spine, showing her frustration. Jess bit at her collarbone, pushing the strap of her bra aside and undoing the eyehook at the back.

He pinched her nipple with his thumb and forefinger, moving down to ease the pain with his mouth. He kissed her breasts and ran his hands over the soft skin at her lower back, her sex, easing the built-up tension in her calves.

Her legs widened on instinct, making a hollow that his hips fit into easily. When Rory ground her hips up into his he felt past her cotton panties and the soft down of her pubic hair. He parted her sex and stroked her clitoris, sliding his hand inside of her.

She cried a little and turned her head to the side, clamping around his hand when he pushed into her past his knuckles. He repeated the action, kissing her and feeling the change between her legs as she came. "That's it," he whispered to her, his lips on her mouth while tears rolled down her cheeks. She felt heat roll off her in strong waves while she cried quietly in his arms.

--

The light from the kitchen made the hallway look slightly shadowed but comparatively inviting. Rory was grateful for the indirect source of illumination; it allowed her some privacy when it came to facial expressions and meaningful looks. She wore her clothes now, the pale blue button-down from her meeting with Hedges and the ambiguous black skirt she was prone to wearing for multiple occasions. She tucked her hair behind her ear, her eyes still slightly swollen.

"I'm sorry about before, I just . . . "

"It's ok," Jess said, running his thumb along her cheek. "Things are different. There's nothing wrong in what you're feeling." His voice consoled her, pacified her nerves. Rory felt the raging embarrassment from earlier quell at the touch of Jess's hand in hers, pulling her closer.

"I mean, I don't usually," she struggled to find the words, to speak, to prevent herself from crying.

"Hey," he pulled her into the shape of his body, holding her against him, rubbing her back as if she were a small child that had just experienced their first nightmare. Jess kissed her cheek while she held him around his waist.

"I'm sorry," Rory said, her voice muffled by the thin cotton of his undershirt. He'd thrown his clothing on quickly as a means of comfort. It had been his subtle attempt at putting her tears behind them.

"Don't apologize. It's alright. I don't care, honest Rory." She nodded into his chest while he ran his fingers through her hair.

He held her for a moment longer until they broke apart. "It's ok if you don't want to come tomorrow."

"What? Oh, I'll come, I really want to. I can't miss your opening." Rory rubbed at her eyes, gathering herself back together.

Jess toyed with a strand of her chestnut hair fondly, "Ok."

She laughed thickly. "I'm just being silly." He smiled.

Rory stood up a little taller and kissed him, holding his face in her hands. It was soft and shallow, an atonement for any doubts she may have given him.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

He kissed her lips, twice and then again, soothing her. "Goodnight, Rory."

The door clicked softly behind her.

--

Friday opened with plans and projects flying. With a mere six hours until the opening of Truncheon Publishing Jess was grateful that many of the last-minute details he had to take care of were simple and without complication. He'd spoken with Rory shortly after waking up earlier that morning. She'd called him from bed and explained what she thought to be the reason behind her upset the night before. He was patient with her, reasonable and caring. She promised to be at the opening as soon as she could, and wished him good luck.

Numerous deadlines had flown by over the course of late October, all of the schedules coordinating to a point of equilibrium. The writers had made their final drafts, the magazine that Truncheon put out was printed and on it's way to newsstands and record stores and coffee shops scattered throughout the metropolis of New York. All the renovations at the publishing house had been completed up to Jess's standards. He had never felt more anxious for the whole deal to finalize as he did now.

His phone rang with Chris's name flashing on the caller ID.

"Je—sse," he called over the expanse of satellites and audio technology, stretching Jess's name into multiple syllables. "How're you feeling? Nervous? Nauseous? Should I put the closest mental institution on speed dial?" He joked.

"I'm fine thanks, since you asked so nicely. In fact, I couldn't be cooler unless I was a cucumber." Jess replied in his usual sarcastic manner.

"Yeah, yeah." Chris mused knowingly. "Nick's told me why you're so non-stressed. Nice, isn't it . . . " he trailed off.

"And why is that?" Jess leisurely flicked through a stack of mail.

"Because you've finally gotten yourself a girlfriend. Not just a date, or casual, random sex, but a real cooks-your-dinner-puts-up-with-your-bullshit-fuck-you-every-night girlfriend." Christ dissolved into laughter while Jess raked a hand through his hair.

"My life would be immensely easier if I could train Nick not to talk to people. You know, sew his mouth shut, use some superglue, maybe some mind control. "

"Makes you wish he was a golden retriever, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, instead of a golden-haired gossip."

"He also says that she's smart, dresses nice, a cute girl. My question is, what the hell is she doing with you?"

Jess's eyebrows shot up in amused surprise. "Are you insinuating that I'm incapable of being in a serious relationship? Funny, coming from the man with commitment issue up his ass and down his throat. Hypocrite."

Chris made a sound of indifference.

"That reminds me," Jess said. "There's a girl I want you to meet. Her name's Denzella Selim, she does the whole poetry bit for me, you know, just blatantly your type."

Chris's voice took on a tone of interest. "Selim? What is that, Hispanic?"

"Egyptian. She's lived here for all but two years of her life so you wouldn't now unless you saw her." He explained.

"Have I mentioned that I'm sorry for teasing you? Because you know I was only kidding—"

"Save your 'thank-you' for when you get here. I happen to be a freak about sincere apologies. Later."

Jess hung up on his friend, suddenly excited for the events that would soon be set into motion.

--

Rory frantically dialed her mothers number for the millionth time that week.

"Hello?"

"What do I wear?"

"This conversations sounds oddly familiar. Am I experiencing a flash-back?" Lorelai joked.

Rory blanched. "No. But I seem to have a reoccurring issue."

"Tell me, what is the occasion for the wardrobe crisis at hand," she continued to speak with amusement. Apparently Rory's self-images troubles where Lorelai's sole form of entertainment. Rory saw little humor in the situation.

"Stop laughing. This isn't funny, really, it isn't. If you were in this situation I wouldn't laugh at you. In fact, I'd give you tasteful recommendations for outfits that would relieve your worrying process!" She stopped talking, nervous and exasperated at the same time. Lorelai attempted to sober herself.

"Take a breath. You still haven't told me what you need clothes for. But I'm fairly certain that Jess factors into this somewhere," she said smugly.

"Try everywhere. He's having his opening tonight and it's kind of a big deal and I want to look nice but not like I tried really hard—"

"Open your closet door," Lorelai interrupted. "Look in the very back, in the blue bag. Unzip it." Rory did as she was told, following her mother's instructions.

"I forgot I had this, it's perfect!"

"Of course it is. By the way, you can thank me later, and when I say later I mean _weeks_ later, not later tonight when Jess is taking it off of you. Another tip, don't pull a Brigit Jones, go for the date-night underwear."

"Have I mentioned you're the greatest mom ever?"

She sighed dramatically. "Only, what, six-billion times? I've got to run, sweets. Have lots of sex. Don't come home until Monday morning. Talk to you later."

Lorelai rang-off, leaving a laughing Rory on the other end of the line.

--

"Stop it."

Nick blinked, startled. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

"What?"

"That thing," Jess said, "that counting thing you do. You're driving yourself crazy."

Jess's yellow-haired friend blanched, his eyes traveling from face to face about the room. "I'm not nervous, really, I'm the picture of calm and serenity—"

"Oh look, Mathew's here. "

"—tranquility, totally under control."

Jess drifted over to his wide-eyed friend who had driven all the way from Philadelphia. When he saw Jess he scurried over immediately, obviously excited.

"God, this is so East Village Punk—Jess—I can't believe, damn, it's good to see you," Mathew settled. He reframed from moving closer to Jess because he knew he was odd when it came to proximity. There had been an ongoing joke at the Philadelphia publishing house, it's contents centered mainly on Jess and his extreme privacy, a fact that had proven difficult as well as humorous when Jess, Mathew, and Christ had all lived together.

"You get here ok?" Jess asked, leading his friend over to get a drink.

"I was fine until I actually got into the city, then I couldn't find my ass from my thumb. But I left two hours earlier than necessary—and I ended up getting her on time."

Jess smirked, his arms crossed casually. "I'm resisting the urge to call you a dumb ass, but it's really hard. Why didn't you just come with Chris?"

Mathew shrugged, holding a beer. "He wants to stay for a couple days, his aunt lives up here or something. Why are you laughing at me? I don't know these things!"

Now Jess really was laughing. "That whore," he joked. "I told him about Denzella Selim, remember her? Yeah, well she works for me now, runs all the poetry stuff we do. I may have mentioned her earlier today and I might have touched on the fact that she's currently boyfriend-less and exactly Chris's type."

"That little bastard," Mathew said mildly. "Well, can you blame him? It's obvious even to me that Denzella's hot, and I don't even like girls."

Jess nodded. "She's the type he fawns over."

"Speaking of sexual partners," Mathew's gaze became more animated. "Nick tells us that you've acquired a new one."

"Damn Nick and his blabish, girl-like tendencies," Jess cursed.

"No secrets among friends, right?" He winked, elbowing Jess playfully.

Jess laughed darkly. "Ha. So how much did he tell you?"

Being the more naive of the two, Mathew stroked his chin in mock thoughtfulness. A look from Jess caused him to sober himself.

"The usual. He's jealous, I mean, go figure, right?" He sighed. "I'm joking, really. Apparently you've landed yourself some sexy little journalist girl from one of those old Connecticut families—with brains." He chuckled. "You really shouldn't tell Nick these things." He downed the last of his drink and wandered off to speak with someone who had just drawn him over, leaving Jess unoccupied to observe who had just walked through the door.

His body recognized her the moment she stepped into the room. It took a second for his mind to catch up, pushing through the shock and the thick curve of lust that shot through him at the sight of her.

Rory approached him, eyes shinning, wearing an Audrey Hepburn-type getup. She was wrapped up in black, her dress curving and framing the best of her body. She had left her hair loose and flowing, free to drape down her back.

He kissed her in greeting, cupping her cheek. The people that milled about the room took no notice of the couples interaction, at first. They were spotted by Mathew while he hung around with Nick, seeing the girl that his friend had claimed in his absence. Rory giggled into Jess's shoulder while he kissed the junction between her jaw and her neck. He looked up at her.

"What?" He fought a smile.

Her cheeks were tinged with pink, flushed, reeling. She laughed again. "We have an audience, look."

He shook his head and led her away in search of drinks, his hand resting on the small of her back.

"Hey," he brushed a stray hair out of her eyes, a drink in her hand. "I'm glad you came."

She kissed him quickly. "Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss this, even if we weren't, you know, together. Jess, this is huge." She babbled and blushed a fair shade of crimson. "I'm proud of you."

They kissed again.

--

One of the thin, black straps of her dress had inched its way down her ivory shoulder, making her collarbone appear bare and uncovered. It was fixed with the soft touch of Jess's hand, the contact warm against her skin. She shivered.

The room was full of people; most of them quiet, soaking up what one of Denzella's poets was reciting. Jess and Rory stood in the back while Belinda Stavski—a Russian-American poet who had lived undiscovered in Maine until two months prior when she showed up for a modeling gig for one of Nick's painters—gave her performance in her butterscotch voice that came from cigarettes and vodka.

"You look amazing."

Rory's eyes were glossy and reflective. He wanted to fall into her and stay there. She moved closer to him, holding her arms a little self-consciously.

She wore the kind of outfit that Jess found implacable. Versace or dime store rag, he couldn't tell. Her pumps could have been vintage treasures or overpriced Prada. It was a combination of sorts, the clothes she wore and her sweet openness. She was an alluring cross between a pubescent girl-child and wraith-like woman.

She fought the urge to touch him, knowing that it would be crashing fear coupled with quixotic ecstasy. It was obvious to her now. Everything about Jess that had seemed daunting and untamed wasn't a farce per se, but merely a part of him that she hadn't been able to understand. His aloof mannerisms and lack of elaboration had always baffled her, that is, until she learned to detect signs of communication other than words.

When Belinda finished the crowed applauded graciously. Denzella's girl had the kind of tact that hadn't been found in most of Mathew's more free versed ventures.

Voices burst back into life. In all the noise the pair went unheard.

"When can I get you alone?" Her hand was a pale flame on his chest.

"I don't have to stay much longer." People were beginning to clear out, on their way to cabs and drinks and other parties. Belinda's reading had been the final act. "Give me ten minutes. Here," he slid something into her hand; it was the key to his apartment.

He kissed her, taking her lower lip between his teeth and feeling hot, holding her hips in his hands and feeling her there, feeling her body. The fact that she was staying with him tonight, the knowledge that there was no one else, made his head whirl with possibilities. It was going to happen. The event he had anticipated for the better part of seven years was vital and living beneath his fingertips.

He pulled away with an air of finality, out of his wits as he went to say his goodbyes.

--

**A/N:** _Last update before I take my exams. This upcoming week is going to be absolutely insane so I wanted to post this beforehand. I've got Honors English II, Honors Civics and Economics, Advanced Functions and Modeling, and French II. Write reviews to make me feel better?_


	12. Ain't Love Grand

**Title:** _Pulse_

**Rating**:_ R_

**Date Started: **_1-6-08_

**Date Finished: **_2-14-08_

**Summary:** _He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N:**_ I don't really know what to say to you guys except . . . MATURE CONTENT. If that offends you then I would recommend skipping this chapter. Just a warning. As per usual, reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Twelve: Ain't Love Grand**

The way Jess saw it, there were a few ways this could go.

He would take control of this. The opportunity was too great to pass up flippantly like a casual, one-time encounter—this he knew.

In every twelve-step program you're first asked to admit, to confess, to surrender with your little white flag of defeat. In his experience, sex seemed to work out the same way. Attraction could be seen as the precursor to the initial crack, the moment when feelings became a fully formed idea, eventually resulting in a decisive action. If you were an alcoholic the action was a drawn-out personal hell—sobering up and using the one muscle that counts. If you were Jess Mariano that action was the make-or-break catalyst that would fling him into timelessness or trap him in the bottom half of an hourglass.

Option A was simple. Don't think. Do. Grab all your machinery and dive in.

That was how he had lived the majority of his life. Gritting his teeth and shivering and taking every hit square on the chin. It was something he easily understood and knew how to handle. It summed up a frightening total of his major life decisions.

Option B was somewhat different. In this scenario he saw himself walking out on all of it. Not just Rory, but the entire life that he'd built for himself. The idea was absurd, at this point a near impossibility.

Option C shot through him like a narcotic, heightening the points he needed and obliterating all that stood in his way. He was going to do this on his terms, how he wanted, with the person he had wanted for the better part of his adult life.

Jess tried to take the stairs one at a time, tried to think. He saw everything distantly before him, the smoky pull of his door at the end of the hallway. It was victory and surrender in a myriad of thought provoked needle marks. His choice was in his veins, in the slight pause he took at the top of the stairs.

The farewell of the eggplant walls went unnoticed by Jess as he opened the unlocked door to his apartment. Closing it behind him and securing all the necessary locks, he tossed his jacket over the back of a chair on his way to the bedroom.

He could feel the tension being pulled beneath his skin. It was dark and late and he was about to fuck Rory's brains out. Jess felt his body surge at the though. Time and place began to dissipate.

--

He felt the wooden doorframe embrace his left shoulder blade, everything dappled in golden lamplight, colors making patterns across her exposed back. He could see the tension in her posture; the way she held herself reminded him of a schoolgirl about to be picked apart and interrogated—the last examination.

She kept her eyes on the window, her shoes kicked off somewhere in his bedroom. Jess didn't bother to look. She could feel his eyes on her, tracing her neck, breathing in the perfumed touch of her hair, waiting for her to approach him.

They were dancing around each other, had been since they were kids. She remembered imagining this, playing it out in her head until the idea itself became inevitable. Rory and Jess. The name itself was just a rouse; Catherine and Heathcliff, Jake and Brett, Rory as helpless, pinning Juliet and Jess as banished, lovesick Romeo. They were the embodiment of death and lust and truth. And rebirth.

She faced him with her eyes big and cobalt blue, a mix of softness and indigo as they looked him up and down, caught the waves of something—_something_—radiating from both of them.

They drew closer to each other. The entire situation had socked her with memories of lying in her childhood bedroom at night with her panties kicked off and the sheets turned down, her window open to the thick summer night. Her legs stretched out, toes flexing in the clean linen, wishing he would come and hoping against all rationality that she would cease to be alone. She remembered leaving the window like that until mid-September when it started to get cool and she had to keep it closed but unlocked. All those empty nights of wanting to be filled and mounted, slammed into, fucked by someone she wanted.

Rory blinked and pressed her pink lips together. Jess ran his thumb across her cheek, her silken eyelids.

He'd seen her as someone else's possession since the night they met. Owned and controlled, always somebody other than her calling the shots. It used to make him sick, watching her, missing her. His head felt clouded, perfumed with the surreality of the moment and his hatred of the men who'd stood in the way of what had been really going on.

He slid the strap of her dress down her arm. It started out as just the one—the thin strip of fabric grazing her lower shoulder, slipping—and slowly became two. The heat was getting to him. He pulled off his shirt, tossing it away from his body in a careless manner.

She'd imagined this moment innumerable times, Jess, the tantric wonder. His body hot and inescapable, surrounding her. A no frills deal.

It surprised them both when she pulled his lips down to kiss her. What she lacked in technique he made up for ten-fold in natural ability. It started a little slowly. He tilted her upward somewhat because of the height difference. His lips slipped in between hers, warm, coaxing, a plea for permission. He held her closer, less about protocol and more about a physical magnetism. He ached to touch her.

Jess moved to unzip her dress, felt the muscles contract at the contact of his hands. The black cocktail dress fell to her waist, showing her nearly naked back. He pressed her into him from behind, sliding his hands over her exposed stomach and holding her there, feeling the softness of her skin and the firm under-layer of bone and muscle.

The silken fabric slipped past her hips and onto the floor soundlessly. She arched her back like a cat, one of those innate reactions, turning her head to the side while he kissed her neck. His tongue trailed the line of a delicate vein, moving down to focus on her collarbone as she turned to face him. The feeling of her hot, exposed body pressed against his made him feel slick with boneless lust. She laced her arms around his neck while he scooped her up, cupping her bottom and feeling the taunt muscles in her thighs. She landed on the bed somewhat gracelessly but he was blind to that, taking notice of her flushed face and the gentle swell of her breasts against the strapless bra she wore.

He covered her with his body, the crush of his belt buckle against her black panties felt deliciously rhythmic. He rolled his hips against her once, twice, and then again, releasing the clasp of her lace bra from behind.

Her hands were at his waist, feeling him between his legs and struggling with his belt and button-fly. He kissed her hard on the mouth and pulled at her hair, threading it through his hands and feeling her naked chest against his. She had only managed to work his jeans halfway down his thighs.

Their bodies became untangled when he leaned off her and removed his pants. It was the origin of a new moment, a snapshot of Jess looking down at her while he removed his clothes. She remembered having fantasies just like this years before. Imagining it, dreaming about sex the way all virgins manage to, unrealistically. That's what Dean and Logan had both proven with their needs and eventual lack of interest in more than her snatch. Days of crossing her legs tightly together in class and simulating pressure, squeezing her muscles together while her Biology teacher went on about Transcription to Translation and the Human Genome Project.

There was an ocean collecting between her legs, waves breaking with every deep push of her circulatory system. She could feel it, the heat coiling in her stomach, harsh and guttural. An action left over from the prehistoric era.

He rolled back on top of her, parting her lips with the sensations he created, stirring up her unused reserves. Feeling her sides and her breasts, he was heavy and almost sinuous against her, pushing into the soft expanse of her anatomy.

The male body had always been a case of mysticism to Rory. When she dreamt of sex the parts seemed blurred, like the visage of a dirty mirror or grease-covered glass. All she took away from such dreams were the arrows of sticky heat that pulsed inside her cunt, flickering from her lips and her nipples. The physical cause of these sensations had never been precisely identified until the loss of her virginity. The logistics themselves still surpassed her understanding; she'd never been able to wrap her mind around how it worked as a complete process. She learned early on to just do what felt adequate, to take herself out of the physical realm and into the mental arena. The kind of sex that Rory knew _hadn't_ been about her.

Jess was making it about her.

His body was more complex than simple explanation. Everything about him was wild and untamable. His wiry ebony hair and gold-flecked eyes made him the kind of boy that Rory had only read about. She'd never accepted the concept of his reality, that he wasn't some character that she'd dreamt up or written about. Mystery boy, Mr. Brooding olive-skinned seducer. When he looked at her she got the impression that she was being unzipped, opened from her chest plate down to her clit. His eyes on her made her feel like he could see straight into that secret, hollow space that shivered and convulsed between her legs.

He pinched her nipples, kissing her breasts and moving to drag his teeth lightly over her sensitive skin. Their stomachs were pressed together—alabaster and haughty olive oil—moist with sweat and the fogged haze of serotonin.

She had her face turned away, cheek pressed to the pillow, her legs splayed and utterly useless. Boneless. Sensation so thick that only her faint, kittenish moans could part the air.

Jess detached himself from her breast and held her wrists above her head, holding her there with one hand and cupping her cheek with the other. He kissed along her neck and behind her ears, on the soft underside of her jaw where her skin was the softest. Hot, open-mouthed kisses that made her dig her nails into her palms.

"Look at me," his voice was deep in his larynx, dark and almost sinful, the kind of thing that made her calves clench and the insteps of her feet tense. He breathed heavily against the feminine curve of her shoulder blade. "Say that you want it."

She felt a surge of liquid heat seeping through her thighs. Her hips thrust upwards into his, holding herself against him. He sucked in a breath but held still, watching her beneath him.

Her chest heaved, "Jess, please." Her eyes were sloppy, dilated, black lined with blue. "Fuck me," her voice cracked a little, her wrists were beginning to bruise but she couldn't even feel it. "Touch me—for years I . . . please, I always wanted you to, oh God." The heat of his body overtook her; she began to ease up from her life of perfection.

His eyes were the darkest she'd ever seen them. There was the briefest of pauses in which disbelief overtook his features.

Recovery came swiftly.

He moved down her body like a pro, taking her nipple in his mouth and pushing down on her pelvis with his wry fingers. He stoked the inside of her thighs with hot palms, kissing her flat belly and the soft underside of her breast. She pulled at his hair, grabbing dark fistfuls of it, something that created a deep growl in his throat. He was the lion and she was the sphinx, circling each other throughout nature and artistic history.

She sucked in air through a tight chest, her body reeling as Jess swirled his tongue around the inside of her bellybutton. She felt her hips jump to accommodate all the tightness she was feeling, the shock and pleasure as his fingers parted her slit and began working inside her.

She felt herself undulating against him, spreading her legs wider and feeling weightless as he licked the skin of her inner thigh, all sweetness and salt. The taste of women. He removed his hand and replaced it with his tongue, stroking her cunt. All the noise she'd been holding in escaped from her mouth while she fisted the sheets between her hands. Flames devoured her extremities. Her body possessed more sexual incite than her mind.

Her panties had been removed and discarded at some time; she couldn't pinpoint the exact moment. It was all happening to her, her heat and her intoxicated, lustful helplessness. Her nipples rose as the tight center of her milky breasts. Jess cupped them in his hands while holding her legs apart—his knees pinning her thighs to the mattress.

She was fighting him, trying to lock his hips with hers, digging her nails into the smooth crests of his hips. She tried to work his boxers off.

"Jess," Rory moaned at the loss of contact as Jess removed his last article of clothing. He crawled up beside her, nonchalant. Rory's mouth had formed a pink-bitten O.

She dragged her nails over his chest, stroking the flat disk of his nipple. She bit his collarbone. "I used to dream about this."

He cupped her between her legs, hands sinking into her sweet flesh. Springy, wet. She pressed her face into the pillow, teeth biting the fabric. He was still cool, commanding and unshaken. She wanted to stroke him all over and make his body tense and rigid. It all came back to the Genesis of Power-Play. Adam and Eve, their bodies were nothing if not warped, celestial mirror-patterns. There was nothing uncertain about Jess's expression.

His hands traveled down to her thighs, her calves. It felt dirty and sinuous but she loved that he could do it to her. Make her wet and squirming with just his hands. His fingers tapped around the edge of her bellybutton and she couldn't hold herself up. The contact of his wild, unruly hair on her naked stomach made her shudder. Her legs clenched together and she felt the first wave of steady, weakening heat travel through her body.

"Tell me what you dreamt."

She could feel the rumble of his through against her stomach, golden and harshly masculine. His voice was steady, languid, like the feeling of her sex being slowly lathered. Deep in the way that water is deep, pressure that builds at the bottoms of oceans and far inside his chest.

His body was composed of harsh angles and arches, dark and sweet like forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Dirty words curled up on her tongue and weighed on her stomach. He smoothed his hands over its surface while kissing the underside of her breast.

He moaned contentedly at the feeling of her nails against his scalp, her fingers running through his course, dark hair.

She leaned down to press her mouth close to his ear. "I used to dream about you fucking me in a room full of books."

His world had become compressed, just the two of them in bed together, her lips buzzing over the golden shell of his earlobe, wet and breathy, pressed to the soft coils of skin.

"I always imagined it during the day, when the sun was beginning to set and we'd be able to see each other."

Her hand closed around the length of him, softly, flower-like—

"Or in the shower," she licked his neck, lightly stroking his shaft. "Anything with water."

Their roles had switched. She was trying to balance out their interactions, trying to fuck back. An old phrase flooded back from one of Jess's distant memories: _tease_.

He pressed her down onto her back. The sudden movement jarred both their bodies, senses rocketing. Rory was stretched flat on her back with her legs splayed. Powerfully motionless while Jess ran the pad of his thumb over the strip of skin between her thigh and her center.

His golden eyes were messy and dilated, almost completely black. The cold air against her cunt made her legs quiver, her hips squirm. Seconds before she had been burning, molten, cracking and spilling over her bodies' physical rim. Now she just wanted to be filled, wanted the weight of time and matter to slam her into the headboard.

"You think you know what this is going to feel like," he positioned himself mere inches from her, everything about him blunt and indestructible. The timbre of his voice, speaking to her, wetting her with words—language sliding in and out, in and out—fucking her with clauses and descriptive adjectives.

He wanted to rip her open, tear her to shreds, fuck her until she sobbed. "But you don't."

She made a sound, half cry and half moan. "Show me."

He entered her just as she inhaled, her chest and cunt tightening simultaneously. Her muscles strained against one another, spasming from the force of him. She was sweet and tight, soaked all the way down to her thighs. He held his forearms above her shoulders, trying to control his breathing and keep his body still while she adjusted. He kissed the underside of her jaw, stroked her hair as the tension began to vacate her body.

It wasn't hard to get started. They both had experience when it came to fucking, and this was where it counted. There weren't any questions, no note taking. Sex was explorative, requiring the kind of curiosity that she usually never allowed herself to display. The innocence, the naiveté, it made him want to crack her open with what she already knew; what she wanted and what he was doing to her. He wanted to dive into her, hips out, dick first.

He didn't let them settle into a steady rhythm. She was constantly being turned and stretched and slammed into. She was distracted from her lack of control by what he was doing to her. He kept pulling back and thrusting in, splitting her without mercy or prelude.

She felt him everywhere. The muscles of his back fisted beneath her hands, the tug of his lips on her neck—kissing her—on her face and just beneath her ears, her chest, his thumb and forefinger on her nipple while he molded her breast in his hand. All of it pulling her tighter and tighter, her body taunt like a bow.

He pulled away slightly, attempting to find his bearings. "Hold on."

Her legs were now against her chest, holding her hips at a drastically different angle. He pumped into her again and again, his jaw tense with concentration while he fucked her. It was becoming more and steadily more. She felt restless but etherized, her hips being sharply rocked into pleasure-soaked delirium.

She couldn't hold on to all the events, Jess and how he would thrust into her like a blacksmiths hammer, balls deep inside her core and slowly sinking in and then outward. Her own voice startled her sometimes, pulling her out of a thick, currented trance, ripping his name from her lips. Jess, she howled, moaned like a banshee. Over and over, it came after every breath. The world of isolation that he knew in all its intimacies had become meaningless, lost in the quivering, tightening clench of Rory around him. Her legs fell to the side, weak and paralyzed, boiling liquid that had formed deep inside her pussy like a sloshing ocean.

He circled his hips in a counter-clockwise motion, spinning her past Earth and around the belted planets. She felt water collecting around her eyes, her face sticky sweet with perspiration. His mouth became fused to hers, and that's when she began to feel it. Building, being pulled out of her abdomen like the great schism of man and immortality. Her body grew tense; her eyes squeezed shut in concentration. She felt the deep-slung twinge inside her cunt, barely a breath away from tipping the scale between paralysis and oblivion.

One, two, three. "C'mon, fuck me Jess, harder."

She was Marla Singer begging for it off-screen while Jack and Tyler Durden struggled with the grappling trade-off of their identities. A cat in heat, Rowan Mayfair being raped repeatedly by Lasher, Sky Pacifica in a Nersesian-style page-turner.

Jess lifted her hips off the mattress, "Oh, that's it, just like that, oh fuck." She thrust up against him.

Her back arched, spine strung out beyond her normal flexibility. The tips of her hair brushed the bed while she propped herself up.

Jess pressed her flat on the bed. "Lay down."

He hadn't been getting enough pressure from her. She felt his body press down on top of her, inside her. She couldn't fight or move or do anything but lie there and let him fuck her into nothingness. The pores of her skin were opening, their edges stretching thinner like the plant leaf stomata, that tinny opening, essential to it's survival but smaller than a pinhead. Her mind flew back to her teenage years, all the mindless little facts she'd crammed into her head out of boredom and loneliness. Her body was being cracked open, splintering her aching limbs like the molten remains of whatever girlish innocence she still possessed. If it had still been there it was now eradicated, ripped from her womb and replaced with something infinitely better than handholding and boyfriends that called when they said they would.

What she had was the kind of hot, perfumed slick sweetness that could make her weak and reeling with a bronze touch. She thought of none of it and all of it. She could do nothing. She was nothing—and Jess was everything. He filled her with that dark, trembling pulse of wetness between her legs and behind her eyelids, in her veins. She burned from the feel of him.

He had resettled his weight on his forearms, elbows just above her shoulders. They kissed fiercely as they both began to feel it, the last straining lurch of their bodies. Infinitely open, he was a breath away from letting go.

Her feet were pressed against the mattress, pushing, pushing, pushing up. Her clitoris was throbbing like a hand-held heart, sending deep, almost violent spasms through her legs. The delicious pressure of Jess against her pelvis, her lower stomach, her inner thighs—it made her muscles clench like the closing of an iron curtain.

The white, burning pressure was ripping through her. Building in her lower stomach and tearing its way up. Her legs shook. She squeezed her eyes shut, bursts of light pressing behind her closed eyelids. Her chest felt hot and constricted; relief came when she let out a moan loud enough to wake half of New York. Her orgasm shook through her body like the shuddering release of years of foreplay.

She tried to breath, to lie perfectly still and hold herself carefully. The tense muscular framework of Jess's body beneath her fingertips had grown impossibly hard and strained, the last warning signs. She threaded her fingers through his hair, tugging, trying to be perfect for him. It wasn't needed. He couldn't have held on longer if he'd tried.

It was all consuming, stronger and more powerful than his body or his resistance. Jess could feel heat soak into his skin and settle deep in his bones. He was cumming, pouring himself into her without restraint. It came on fast, like his body was being jerked from his center outward and pulled through his shoulders and calves and the layers of muscle in his thighs and arms. Spasms strung through his limbs like a deep-strung caress. He arched into the silken flesh of her neck, disjointed and fused, her body—around his, beneath him—had pulled out all of his vulnerabilities and lain them before her. He couldn't speak, couldn't remove himself from her as his orgasm came to a close.

The room flickered and swam before his vision briefly. He held Rory next to him, face to face on their sides, and pulled out.

She slid her hand against his chest while he held her. They'd left a dim lamp on through the course of their interactions, for this Rory was grateful. It allowed her one last fill of Jess before her eyelids were weighed down by exhaustion. They lay pressed together in Jess's dark bedroom, two figures wrapped in the Garden of Eden. Her body fit next to his like the matching cover of a worn book. She slept very deeply.

--

**A/N:** _I don't think I can express how hard I worked on this chapter and how much thought went into writing it. I hope it shows. I also hope that this didn't offend anyone, because that was not my intention. Your thoughts and comments would be unbelievably helpful to me, so, in summation, if you read please take the time to review :D_


	13. Au Courant

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _2-17-08_

**Date Finished**: _3-12-08_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_The response to chapter twelve was probably the most excellent feedback that I've ever received. I just hope that I can continue live up to your expectations. Just as a warning, most of the chapters from here onward will contain some type of mature theme. The first scene picks up almost right after chapter twelve. Beta read by the amazing _**Keliana LeFey**_. Reviews are always appreciated. _

**Chapter Thirteen: Au Courant**

She lay on her stomach, her legs parted like a sleeping child's, hair disheveled and coppery in the lamplight. The black linen sheet covered her bottom and the backs of her legs, showing off the pale skin of her back and the side of her breast. Jess's back was against the headboard, looking down at her with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his silver Zippo clicking to light the tip.

Rory giggled, "You smoke afterwards?"

"Hey," he defended, "just trying to make our consummation official." Jess toyed with her hair, brushing it out of her face and over her shoulder.

She scooted closer to him, rearranging their bodies so she lay on his chest, her ivory cheek against his pectoral.

"You don't mind, do you?" He exhaled smoke while Rory lightly traced one of his ribs.

"I don't mind," she said, compliant and wanting, like Dagny Taggart gazing at John Galt.

Jess felt for her shoulder and her back, touching her spine and her naked stomach. "Thank you for lying," he teased, cheeky and omniscient. His hair was wild and curled, sections playing on the light like lustrous, shining metal.

"I like weird smells," Rory confessed, "Smoke is one of them. Gasoline, leather stuff, Clorox, that papery smell that comes from new books, and those dryer sheet things." She trailed off, feeling silly.

Jess tapped his cigarette on the side of the ashtray, letting a few of the embers collect in the glass dish. "Do you ever stand in the bookstore and fan a paperback or something, just so you can smell the paper?" He asked, openly tracing her leg that had lost the cover of the sheet.

"Yeah," she shivered when his hand felt the dimple in her lower back, "I usually do that before I buy the book, to see which one smells the best. It goes into the purchasing process. That, and whichever one has the prettiest cover."

He smirked, "Vanity, Gilmore?"

She flicked his ear with her thumb and index finger, "All girls like pretty things."

Jess kissed the apex of her jaw, moving to the pliant skin of her neck. "Note taken."

Rory sat up a little, hovering over him, making her tawny, cordovan locks form a dark curtain around their faces. She kissed him while his hands went to her waist, pressing her down on him. She tucked her hair behind her ear and kissed his cheek. "Do you mind if I go get a glass of water?"

He sat up a little, "I'll get it for you."

"Silly," she got out of bed and scooped up his shirt from the floor, pulling it over her head. "I'm an independent woman," she shook her hair out behind her.

Jess chuckled, "You don't even know where the cups are."

Due to the slim composition of his body, the shirt Rory wore barely skimmed the tops of her thighs, leaving her bottom half naked, her little legs peachy soft and doll-like. Jess watched her trot off into the kitchen, calling out, "I'll find them."

--

The light was golden across the bed sheets. Rory stirred, but only slightly. She was warm beneath the tangle of pillows and limbs, etherized. Dappled waves of sunlight peaked through the white curtains, smooth and pearly. She sat up in bed, stretched, and wiped the sleep from her eyes.

She was alone in bed, a situation that rarely occurred with her previous lovers. The clock on Jess's nightstand read eight-thirty, a good deal later than when she usually woke up. Rory liked to take her time in the mornings, so she got up around seven. It gave her time to drink her coffee and read the newspaper at her leisure.

Her hips were a little sore, but she had expected that. When Rory had confessed to Lorelai that she hadn't dated much since her breakup with Logan, she hadn't been exaggerating. Undoubtedly, she was tighter than two or three years prior, back when she had a steady boyfriend.

The sharp aroma of coffee caught her attention as she began the hunt for her panties. She vaguely remembered Jess taking them off of her and holding her ankles together.

She spotted them by the nightstand, a dark little pile separate from her cocktail dress by the window and her strapless bra that lay on the floor by the dresser. Rory didn't want to put her dress back on because it would imply that she was leaving, and she had no desire to do so. It gave the impression that she was open to contact from the outside world.

Rory threw on the shirt that she'd borrowed the night before and combed her hair with her fingers. She'd brought her toothbrush with her, storing it in her purse. Slipping into the bathroom, she cleaned her teeth and rinsed her mouth out, and felt much better.

--

Jess had never been one to go above and beyond when it came to girlfriends. He always preformed well in bed and he tried to play things cool, to think about relationships in an intelligent way, but he usually found the post-coital share-time practice almost painful to endure. However, it had been surprisingly easy with Rory the night before, talking and bantering after sex. He'd always thought that it was the kind of thing that couples did when they were having marital issues.

He heard Rory enter the kitchen while he was making eggs. There was already a stack of pancakes on a plate by the stove and bacon in the frying pan. She made an effort to keep her face neutral.

She nudged him with her hip, "You made breakfast."

He leaned against the counter, casual in his boxers and sleep-messy hair. "Looks like it."

Rory couldn't help the smile that crept onto her face. "You made breakfast because of me."

Rolling his eyes, Jess said, "No. I routinely make enough food to feed the US armed forces."

She played along, "We show out patriotism in different ways."

Jess tugged on her hips, pulling her closer and slipping his fingers beneath the hem of her shirt, feeling the skin at the small of her back. "Obviously."

She pressed her lips to his naked shoulder, chaste, a lost trace of her former naiveté.

He cupped her bottom and set her on the counter, standing between her parted, dangling legs. "You look good in my clothes," Jess said, feeling the tops of her legs, the backs of her calves.

Rory giggled, kissing his neck. "Better than you."

They kissed warmly and with curiosity. Jess flicked his tongue over the space between her lip and her teeth, showing off a new move. She pulled him closer with her legs, curling her calves along the back of his thighs. He kissed the spot beneath her ear while she encircled him with her arms, her hands teasing his spine.

"Jess," she scooted closer to the edge of the counter.

"Hmm," he pulled at the edge of her black underwear, as if to remove it.

She laughed in his hair, "Your food's burning."

--

Glancing at the clock, Jess noted the time. It was just before nine. He'd slept much later than usual, a fact that was understandable due to the circumstances. They'd done it three times the night before. Jess had originally hoped for four but he'd never felt so bone-heavy and exhausted in his life. Fucking Rory was like running a marathon; he had to concentrate on his breathing and a fixed point separate from her and her alabaster body. If he thought to clearly about who he was fucking, if he let go of his concentration, then he'd cum like a ton of bricks.

Jess looked at her over the kitchen table, eating breakfast in his shirt from the night before. It was Saturday morning—lazy, quiet and unfolding. The idea that he could have her whenever he wanted made him restless. Jess was beginning to formulate a plan of sorts, his mind traveling back to something she'd said last night during sex.

"Hey Rory."

Her throat was still a little scratchy from sleep. She sipped her coffee, "Yeah?"

"Wanna go take a shower?"

--

He could feel Rory's skin jump underneath his fingertips. She shivered at the sensation of his body pressed against her back, both of them wet and warm from the spray of the water. Jess lathered the shampoo in her hair, massaging her scalp and warming her without washing all the soap out.

It was one of those sexy things that she'd never done before. Having a man wash her hair while she was naked and covered in water seemed exotic and intimate in a way that was separate from sex itself. With her previous boyfriends there had never been time to think or plan out little fantasies, let alone explore her partner's body at her leisure.

"I didn't think we'd actually be getting clean," Rory blew a few bubbles out of the palm of her hand.

Cupping her breasts from behind, Jess licked her wet neck and pinched her nipples. "Very clean," he joked.

Her head lolled back, spine softening. He kissed the corner of her mouth and then her lips, spanning her flat belly with his hand. "Thought you'd like that."

She let the hot currents of water wash away the soap. Rory turned and faced him, pulling his face down to her greedily. She felt an inexplicable surge of confidence at the gesture; she was the one controlling him this time. For years they had kept up a steady volley of sexual tension, batting back and forth between anger and intense longing. Rory remembered distinct periods when she was unsure if Jess was a blemish or a crowning jewel in her past history.

He had owned her, fucked her into oblivion with all its spasms and wailing chemical imbalances. She felt a peculiar tightness creep into her legs and her stomach, the throbbing clench of serotonin, traces of it in her water-slippery hands as she reached below his waist.

She stroked the length of him in alternating rhythms. First it went slowly, her hands moving from base to tip in languid, steady patterns, gripping him in her cool fingers. Her teeth scraped over his left nipple while she picked up the speed. He thrust against her cupped palms.

Jess knew from experience that sex in the shower could get tricky; he remembered having some initial trouble in the tenth grade with Andy Merrick, but they'd sorted it out. He'd done it like that with previous girlfriends, but they had all been shorter than him, whereas Rory was closer to his height.

He shifted their bodies, pressing her back against the slick tiles with his mouth on her chest. Rory curled one of her legs around his waist while getting a better hold on him. Jess helped her bring both her legs up to support the weight of her body. They were both straining, their self-preservation wearing thin as Jess entered her, knowing that she was already wet with arousal. Her nails dug into his olive skin while she contracted around him; waves of heat and slick weakness swept through her lower stomach and spinal cord. A pre-orgasm. Now she saw why Jess concentrated so hard.

He rocked against her, a bit slower than what he'd pulled before but more drawn out, deeper. There was no way she'd be able to get her legs over his shoulders, not in an upright position with her entire body wet and slippery. When Jess sank into her she released an involuntary noise, feeling him hard inside her like the snap of a hook and eye. He would pull out slowly, teasingly, only to jar her body with his swift presence. Rory closed her eyes and clenched around him.

She climaxed quickly, faster than he had expected. It was a combination of the pressure on her clit and her inner thighs and the weight of Jess against her pelvis and lower stomach. It flooded her, a tearing fault line within her own body.

He rode her out, diving in for a few more well timed thrusts, attempting to hold himself together for decorum's sake, failing miserably at the sight of Rory's tight pussy around his shaft. The nerves in his body snapped like the sharp pull of a cord.

Jess brought both of them to rest on the floor of the shower, cradling her, easing them both down. She sat with him while he reached to turn off the flow of water.

She sat up slightly to grab a towel while Jess moaned from the loss of contact. She settled her body against his while droplets of water rolled down his chest, curling past the wry planes of muscle and sliding down the sloping crests of his hips. Jess dried her face and hair and shoulders until she was soft and fragrant.

After they were sufficiently dry he rummaged around in his dresser for some clothes that Rory could wear. As much as he liked the idea of spending the day naked, he thought she might feel self-conscious. His assumptions were solidified at the sight of her blush while he casually walked around without his clothes. Jess donned a pair of jeans while she slipped on his navy boxers and a band T-shirt that he stole when he was sixteen.

Clothed, Jess gave her a more detailed tour of his books. Rory bit her lip thoughtfully.

"Jess?"

"Yeah?" He was shirtless on his leather sofa, holding a copy of something that he wanted her to see.

"You don't have to work or anything, do you?"

He gave her a look, "No. I'm free all weekend."

"Good."

--

Her back was pressed against the leather couch cushions with her neck hot and sticky, damp next to the cotton of her borrowed T-shirt. A shudder shot through her thighs; she squirmed.

Jess blew cold air against her center. He smirked, "Having trouble?"

Rory tried to level her breathing; he'd been going down on her for the better part of twenty minutes with no immediate signs of release. "Jess," she moaned, "can't you . . . "

He slid his fingers over her lightly, teasingly. She spread her legs wider in irritation. Jess lifted the hem of her shirt up, kissing the flat plane of peachy skin while his hand stroked her clitoris leisurely. Her hips rose while he spread hot palms over her calves and the hot curve of her inner thighs, tickling the backs of her knees.

His tongue made a hot trail to the soft curls of her dark pubic hair, "Relax."

She could only do the opposite. He traced her silken legs, kneading her skin while he sucked on her clit. Rory made an impatient noise, a cross between a purr and a moan. Jess swirled his tongue around the slick inside of her folds while she removed her shirt completely. Her nipples puckered due to the cool air. Replacing his mouth with his hand, Jess moved to cover Rory's body with his own.

Her knees were bent at identical angles with her feet braced against the cushions. She felt her arousal grow at the sensation of rough denim against the inside of her thighs. They were still in the stages of foreplay but she was writhing; a few deep-rooted tremors were quick indicators of what she wanted.

Jess kissed her all over: her breasts, neck, eyelids, cheeks. She felt herself grazing the edge of her orgasm.

She blacked out for a second with four of his fingers inside her cunt, tearing at the band of muscle between her legs. She moaned unashamedly, feeling hits of pleasure roll off of her, shuddering with the abandon of a young bride on her honeymoon. She twisted her fingers in his hair while he held her left nipple in his mouth, kissing her breast. He was laying her up, making her hot and weak, eventually slumping into herself. Rory's eyelids were sticky with heat. Jess brushed a few strands of her hair from her face, kissing her jaw, chest, ears. She sighed into his shoulder.

--

It was the way he said her name. That was Rory's first coherent thought. He knew how to roll his R's, scratchy and layered like chocolate and spice. She moaned into soft cotton with the slight hiss of his vowels. Her back arched lazily while she stretched in the sun-soaked warmth of the afternoon.

"Rory," Jess was in bed next to her. She curled up closer to him with the sheets at her waist. He pulled her up into the crook of his arm while she settled against his chest. Her leg slipped between his.

He held himself up on his elbow. "Tired?" Jess asked.

"I'm starving."

Smirking, he said, "Should have guessed."

She quickly sat up in bed and slinked her way across the mattress. Jess had carried her useless body to his bedroom after going down on her in his study. The scant garments she had borrowed lay at the foot of the bed; she threw on his wash-softened band T-shirt while gracelessly tugging on her panties. She crawled back over to Jess who was leaning against the headboard.

He sat up a little straighter when Rory sat on his lap, their bodies separated by the thin black sheet. His arm snuck around her waist and held her there.

"C'mon, Jess," she played with his hair—full of curls and kinks—while he kissed her neck luxuriously. "Lets go cook."

He chuckled against her skin. "There's no way I'm letting you cook without a fire extinguisher within reach and a pair of flame repellant underpants."

Her mouth formed the shape of an O. "Don't mock. Your lack of confidence in me is crushing."

Jess ignored her faux astonishment. "So get over it," he said playfully.

She allowed him to switch their positions, laying her down on the bed in a haphazard manner with legs tangled and bodies in varying stages of undress. He removed her shirt easily. Her skin was pink and tender from where the shadow on his jaw-line had rubbed against her. Jess cupped her between her legs while kissing her hungrily.

Impatient, her hand found its way inside the slit of his boxers. She tried to work them off his hips while he bit at her shoulder.

"C'mon, Jess," she repeated.

Rory quickly undressed him. He responded by pulling her underwear down the length of her legs and kissing her collarbone while positioning himself between her thighs. She stroked him, feeling him get hard in her hand. He traced her folds with the head of his penis, pulling away and roughly slipping into her. Jess didn't give her time to adjust. Her hair tumbled over the edge of the mattress while he went into her. Rory hadn't been able to hold out earlier that morning and she wanted to show Jess what she could do. She clenched around him almost painfully, causing him to ease up and rock with her, taking his time and enjoying her body.

She felt heat lick against her insides. Her hands tugged on his hair, lacing through the dark brown curls, something she knew he liked. It was one of those facts she'd picked up when they'd dated in High School. He liked it when girls pulled on his hair, a simple thing that she'd been able to do for him way back when time limits and virginity had stunted their relationship. He shuddered inside her. She'd been right all along.

--

Take-out boxes littered the rumpled bed. Her ivory skin was comically pale next to his distinctive olive complexion. His hand slid over her bare leg while she indulged in sweet and sour chicken.

"Chinese food," Rory said, "definitely a good idea."

Jess took a swig from his bottle of water. "I just seem to be full of them these days."

She snickered, "You're full of something."

He cocked an eyebrow. "Need I remind you that less than half an hour ago you were filled with me?"

"Careful, your innuendo's showing."

Jess smirked and reached for something on the nightstand.

"Got any habits?" He settled next to her holding a pack of Camels and his Zippo. "Besides your caffeine addiction."

Rory eyed the cigarettes suspiciously, "Nope."

Getting one for himself, he asked, "Think you can stomach one?"

--

"That's it, Princess Rory Fucking Gilmore."

The room was dark, a combination of slate and indigo. It was Sunday evening and Jess was determined to end the weekend with a bang, so to speak.

He sat up on his haunches, gripping her hips, holding them in place while he fucked her. She writhed like a cat in heat, her hair a tangled, curling mess. Her nipples stood out as two rosy circles of sensitive skin; because he wasn't directly on top of her she didn't have anything to hold on to. Rory reached up to brace her hands against the headboard while hot tears rolled down her cheeks and between her breasts. She was sobbing, keening with the full capacity of her lungs.

She had reached her first climax earlier but Jess had chosen to ride her out and go for a second. Rory couldn't remember an encounter when she had reached multiple orgasms. Most men didn't have the kind of tact or timing requisite for the act.

Her cunt was sore, burning. She pressed harder for support, her body taunt like a bow, her spine curving like limber Balsam Wood. Jess had all but given up precedent and decorum in favor of reaching his climax. Her hips were bruising beneath his hands, like a dark shadow on her pearly skin.

It was like having a knife separate her down the middle of her sex. The band of muscle that surrounded the length of him clenched and contracted. She shuddered around him, howling.

A pause. Jess thrust into her for the last time.

Orgasm—or rather, cumming—was a bit like being punched in the face. For a moment he felt blinded, the sound of blood reverberating in his skull like the pulse of his brain. His entire body strained against the gridlock of gears and cables. Tendons, slopes of sinewy muscle and salutary bone—his anatomical framework screaming beneath his skin—he emptied himself in her womb.

It was the Genesis of love. Jess was loosing his sperm and his mind. The room swam before his dilated eyes; her pearly body, the black sheets, everything bold as a pen stroke.

_He thinks her wrists are the most beautiful things he's ever seen._

--

The bed was still faintly warm when she woke.

The curtains had been drawn over the windows, an act that warmed her at its thoughtfulness. Rory knew immediately that it was Monday morning, another dull, listless Monday, and that Jess was most likely working.

He had turned the alarm clock so that the display of illuminated numbers didn't face her. Another subtle gesture? Silently, Rory reached for the note that had been left on the nightstand. She let the covers settle around her bare waist while she lay back down to read what Jess had left her.

_Rory,_

_Had to get to work, didn't want to wake you. Sleep as long as you want, use whatever clothes you need. There's coffee in the kitchen, third cabinet to the right._

_Later,_

_Jess_

--

He called her while she was on the corner of Lexington and Fifth, waiting for the light to change.

She was wearing a pair of his jeans with the cuffs rolled a little, paired with a hoodie she'd found in the back of his closet, something that looked like it'd been through the dryer too many times to fit properly. Jess's abandoned clothes fit her surprisingly well.

"Hello?" She answered coyly.

"Hey." Sounds of production could be heard in the background. She smiled a little. "Find some clothes alright?"

"How'd you know I'd already left?"

"Hmm," Jess pondered, "I saw you at the corner. Nice look by the way, very neo-punk meets Patty Smith."

"You love yourself too much."

"Could be worse," he joked.

Rory bit her lip while walking down Arlington. "I've got to meet my editor later, but do you want to have dinner at my place? I won't burn down a city block, I promise."

"What, just the building? I jest. What's your address?"

"1422 Broadbank Avenue, C8."

She could make out the scratch of his pen as he scribbled it down, "Got it."

Busy pedestrians pushed past her. "I should probably go."

"Yeah, see you tonight."

"Bye."

_Click._

--

**A/N:** _I made quite a few changes to this chapter so I hope you guys like it. Most of the chapters in this story won't have the same abundance of sex scenes, but, you know, they're going through a honeymoon period :)_


	14. You Show Me Yours

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _3-25-08_

**Date Finished**: _3-29-08_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_This chapter is one of my favorites. It's also possibly the last frivolous chapter that will be written in Pulse. Most of the others will move a bit more quickly with the plot. So, in summation, enjoy :D_

**Chapter Fourteen: You Show Me Yours**

Rory rushed up the stairs to her apartment, nervous but slowly ebbing into exhaustion. Her silver wristwatch read six-forty, giving her twenty minutes to clean up her place and make herself look presentable. Hitching her bag higher on her shoulder, Rory leaned against the battered wooden doorframe while inserting her key into the lock.

She dumped her stuff in the lone straight-back chair by the doorway that guarded her coats and less-than-comfortable heels. Rory kicked off her shoes and padded her way to the bedroom, intent on hanging up her jacket instead of lazily tossing it on the couch.

Her hair was pulled up into a loose bun, a little messy but still more practical than taking it down and working through all the kinks and tangles. She untucked her lavender button-down and contemplated changing out of her tight pencil skirt but decided against it. Six-fifty. Rory hoped that Jess would stick to precedent and be fifteen minutes late.

_Calm down_, she chided, feeling foolish and worked up over nothing, _it's just Jess._

Rory's half-hearted reassurance did little to quell her jittering nerves. She began to create a mental list of all the possible outcomes of the evening, remembering a few particularly awkward dates from her college years and feeling doubtful at the memory of them. Tossing stray articles of clothing into her closet, Rory fixed her bed sheets, neatened up her tinny yellow bathroom, and attempted to de-clutter her coffee table until deeming it impossible.

Despite the fact that they had been together all weekend, Rory couldn't account for the leaping sensation that had settled in her chest or the creeping pink blush that ornamented her cheeks. Luckily she didn't have time to diagnose any of her possible maladies. At the sound of rapt knuckles on her door Rory jumped up quickly, calming herself before answering.

"Hey," Jess said casually, one of his hands shoved in the pocket of his jeans while the other held a white plastic takeout bag, "I brought dinner."

Until then she hadn't noticed the hunger pains plaguing her stomach. "Oh thanks, I'd forgotten to get something to eat. I just got home from work."

He chuckled, following her inside and leaving the bag on her coffee table. "A Gilmore forgetting a meal? Outrageous."

Jess shamelessly surveyed Rory's shabby apartment, noting the scrubbed hardwood floors and decades-old paintjob mixed with the recently bought furniture and crisp white drapes.

"How long have you lived here?" They sat on the couch, close but not exactly touching. Rory spied Jess's pale gray button down peaking beneath his pea coat, cool and soft against his olive skin.

She began to sort out containers and cutlery, "Not very long. I moved here in September, so three months I guess?"

He nodded, restraining the smirk that she glimpsed briefly before he sobered himself. Rory tucked a flyaway behind her ear, averting her eyes and blushing, her cheeks colored. It was mostly hidden due to the weak lighting.

"Rory."

"Yeah?"

Jess's tone was knowing. He'd caught her slight embarrassment. "C'mere."

He pulled her into his lap, touching her cheek and moving to cover her lips, kissing her. She reciprocated his affections by framing his face with her hands, her dark hair making a curtain around them. Jess's hand was splayed across the length of her stomach, something he was most likely doing to soothe her, his palms framing her sides and lower back.

Rory kissed the corner of his mouth, a lovers greeting instead of an initiation. His jaw was smooth and clean-shaven against her cheek.

Jess kept it light, taking her hands in his, their fingers laced together. His laughter was hot against her neck, "Relax."

She settled into the cushions beside him, her bare leg against his dark-wash jeans. "I know you've got to be hungry," Jess said, tickling the back of her knee.

Rory grinned, "I'm starving."

--

Lorelai dialed her daughters cell number for the fourth time in two days. She got Rory's voicemail and hit the 'end' button, smiling knowingly.

Luke had gotten home some ten minutes before. He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

"Still can't get up with Rory?"

"Yeah," Lorelai said, looking like the cat that ate the canary.

She followed her husband into the kitchen and grabbed a mug from the cabinet next to the refrigerator, pouring a cup of coffee.

"Worried that something happened to her?" He asked.

Lorelai attempted to suppress her laughter. "Oh, something definitely happened to her but I'm not all that worried," she snickered.

Luke gave her a funny look. "I don't get why that's so amusing."

The radio was turned on at a low volume. Lorelai sat down at the kitchen table, flicking through a copy of Elle magazine. "That's because you're a man."

He grunted in response, setting another pan on the stove. "Come stir."

She obliged, warming up to share her theory.

"Let's see," Lorelai started, playing with the wooden spoon, "the last time I talked with Rory was Friday. She frantically called me to ask what she should wear on her date."

Luke didn't seem to get it. "Who's she going out with?"

"Jess."

"No," he said disbelievingly.

"I told her to go with the black cocktail dress, classic, simple, sexy. You can't really screw it up. I've called her multiple times to see how it went but I guess she's just really busy. Wonder why," she said innocently.

Luke's eyes were the size of saucepans, "No way."

Lorelai hummed a tune under her breath while she stirred.

"When did this happen?"

"Friday night, apparently. Probably around the same time you and April were getting home from the Science Bee."

Luke was visibly cringing. "Will you stop with the _times_ and the _allusions_ to Rory and Jess, you know—"

"Doing it?" She supplied.

"Does it not bother you that my nephew, Jess, whom you severely dislike, is—is—"

"Having sex with Rory?"

"Yes!" Luke finished, flailing his arms.

"Probably as we speak?" Lorelai was antagonizing him.

"_Jesus_, will you just—"

"Stop?" She offered.

"Exactly," Luke grunted.

A few seconds passed. "No, it doesn't really bother me."

"Honestly?" He asked, "Because I find the idea nauseating."

"Please," Lorelai waved her non-stirring hand dismissively. "You can't say you didn't see this coming."

Luke's ears turned a deep shade of red.

"C'mon! Didn't you see the way they both acted at the wedding?" She asked indignantly.

"They always act like that."

"Precisely, meaning you've had plenty of time to adjust to the idea."

"I don't plan on _acknowledging_ that idea, or scenario, or—"

"You know," Lorelai flashed an evil smile, "if you take the 'u' out of 'Jesus' you get 'Jess'."

Luke gave her a withering stare. "Shut up and stir."

--

His hand was between her legs. It was a tight fit due to her constricting pencil skirt, the closeness amplified by the acute sensation of his cool wristwatch against her bare thigh. Boldly, she lifted her hips so Jess could tug the black fabric past her ankles.

Rory moved to unzip his pants, fumbling with his belt buckle. Jess helped her along and did it himself, kissing her with his right forearm above her shoulder. Her hand brushed over the thin cotton below his waistline, her fingers tracing the elastic and feeling for the slit in his boxers. He let his head fall to her chest, biting her collarbone at the feeling of her hands on him. Rory giggled quietly, dragging her nails over the indention created by his hipbones.

Jess leaned off her, moving her panties aside and stroking her clit with his thumb. Her lips parted slightly, tremors circulating her thighs, her hips jerking to meet his hand. "Jess," she moaned, loud enough to transgress the thin walls of her shabby apartment.

He shoved the triangle of fabric to the right, disconnecting his hand and sliding into her. Rory adjusted for a moment and moved one of her legs to come around his waist, her naked calf against the denim of his jeans. He cupped her breast with his left hand, circling her nipple through her lavender button-down. Jess set his movements to an easy rhythm, an introduction, the first lay of the evening. She felt her body arching, taunt and curving like silken ribbon.

Sweat collected along the edge of her hairline, a delicate sheen of moisture on her forehead. Rory felt her chest expand and contract while Jess redistributed his weight, moving the pressure of his upper body to make it more comfortable for both of them. Her hands crept down to his bottom, holding him at a closer range, her cool fingers pressed between denim and olive skin. Jess breathed into the crook of her shoulder, his curls tickling the underside of her jaw, pulling out slowly and sliding back in with an unremitting wave of force behind his thrusts. She rocked her hips against his, making more noise than before and feeling the thin strip of elastic along the edge of her bikinis rip due to her movements.

Rory pulled on his hair, egging him on and laying flat on her back, her hips slightly raised of their own concordance. Jess's hand reached between their moving bodies, gripping the sides of her hips and leaning back a little while he sank into her a few more times, the motions heavy and repetitive. He felt the pre-tremors in her thighs and the delicious tightening of her around him, pulling at his nerves and synapses.

Her climax came quickly. The muscles in her legs burned beneath her skin, hot and unrelenting while she squeezed her eyes shut, her head turned to the side with her hair loose and trailing off the edge of the couch. She was loud enough to wake two floors of people, something that she was sure Jess found arousing. Her assumptions were proven correct when he came just after her, moaning into her neck and tensing up beneath her hands, coming much more quickly than any of their previous encounters. A flooding sense of relaxation sank into his limbs; an Eve sprung injection of dope and contentment.

Jess eased off of her and settled to the side of her body, his weight resting on his right shoulder while Rory moved her chestnut hair away from her face. She leaned against the couch's armrest, her pale stomach exposed where Jess had undone a few of the buttons, leaving most of them fastened due to their haste. He rested for a moment with his cheek against her stomach, his hand lightly tracing her naked thigh until he sat up soon after, not so much tired as recuperating.

The remnants of their dinner were left on the coffee table as, some twenty minutes later, Jess carried Rory to bed with her legs around his waist. Careful so her legs wouldn't collide with the doorframe, Jess tossed her onto the bed, looking down at her sprawled form while she giggled playfully.

"C'mon Gilmore," he crawled up beside her, "where's your stamina?"

Sitting up, Rory allowed him to slide her lavender blouse off her shoulders.

"You took it out of me," she helped him wriggle out his jeans, "I'm still recovering from last weekend."

Jess moved to unhook her bra, successfully releasing the clasp at the back. Her spine arched against his hand, her bra straps falling limp and curving over the angle of her shoulders. She felt her skin prickle warmly at the feeling of Jess's tapered fingers against her smooth back, touching her spine while his thumb came around to brush the pliant curve of her breast.

Rory brought both of their bodies to lie on the hastily neatened bedcovers, leaning against her pillow while Jess sat up on his elbows. He circled her navel while she pressed herself against him lazily, her flat stomach slightly ticklish.

Her knees were bent with her feet flat against the bed, her girlish hips softly curving against the mattress. Peering downwards, the angle allowed her to catch it, the sight of her brown curls barely concealed by her torn panties. They were yellow cotton bikinis, a little triangle of fabric with strips of cloth circling to the back. One of them had torn.

"Jess," Rory said, running her fingers through her hair and smoothing it away from her temple.

He was slowly kissing her shoulder, kissing the distinct arabesque of her collarbone. "What?" Jess asked, his throat deep and scratchy.

She sighed and felt for his bicep, catching his attention. "Jess, look."

His eyes flicked to what she was indicating; smirking, Jess chuckled against her skin. She playfully bit at his ear, rumpling his indocile hair while lacing their fingers together and holding his hand over the thin triangle of fabric. He traced her with the pad of his index finger, stirring her heat.

"Could you tear the other side?" Rory kissed the twisting curve of his lips, his hollow cheek and slanting jaw.

Jess traced her bottom lip and the sveltely line of her neck, "Gladly."

She felt a relaxed heat radiate from her skin, leaning her head back while Jess made stinging little bite marks on her abdomen. He ran his tongue along her bare hip and blew cool air over the slit between her legs. He looked up at her, eyes dark, lips slightly parted, and took the ripped ends of fabric in one hand while pulling forcefully in the opposing direction. Rory made a soft gasping sound, her hair slanting over her eyes while she slumped against the headboard. Jess fingered the edge before slinking up next to her, marveling at the tinny red mark tattooed onto her milky skin.

He joined her at the head of the bed, tugging on the purple band that held her bun in place. She smiled behind a dark curtain of hair, brushing it behind her ear while he tucked her into him. Rory pushed the covers back with her legs and pulled the sheet over her cooling body; Jess followed suit, tugging the blankets halfway up his abdomen.

Rory's bed wasn't as orderly as he had always suspected. Her linens were matched with meticulous precision but she had three or four squishy pillows lumped together haphazardly. Jess flattened one with his hand and turned on his side, facing Rory. He could barely glimpse her shoulders beneath the white down comforter.

"Hi," Jess nudged her with his left hand, probing beneath the covers in search of her waist.

"Hi," she replied, still smiling and pressing her stomach into his.

"Tired?" He asked, holding himself up with his hand cradling his cheek.

"Maybe," Rory said, fumbling with the edge of the three hundred thread count sheets. "Depends."

She settled herself into the crook of his neck. Her breathing was soft and barely audible, faint little exhales against his chest.

"Hey Rory."

"Yeah?"

Jess shifted, moving onto his stomach and turning his neck. "Do you remember that time when I had a black eye?"

"Yeah," she repeated, not really understanding where he was going.

"Well, I lied to you. There was no football."

This peaked her interest. "They how'd you get it?" She asked, looking up at Jess.

He turned his face so it was against the flat pillow. "I was attacked."

"What?" Her tone was disbelieving.

"By a swan," he finished, covering his head with the pillow.

"A swan?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Where do you think?" Came his muffled reply.

"Oh my God," she was beginning to laugh now, "You were attacked by a swan. Did you try to hurt it?"

"No," he said, "I was reading."

"I mean after it 'attacked' you," Rory snickered.

"Yeah, I did. I went after it with one of Luke's soup ladles."

Rory began to giggle maliciously. "Luke knows?" She questioned.

"Luke knows," Jess answered.

"I have to tell mom—"

"Tell Lorelai and I'll rip off more than just your underwear," he muttered threateningly, hiding his embarrassment while Rory laughed into the bedcovers.

--

The clock read ten past two, early, an interlude between midnight and morning. The time also alerted him that he had been watching Rory for a good twenty minutes, merely observing her while she slept. Her blue bed sheets were tangled around her torso, forming a rumpled mess that resembled a straight jacket and causing most of her upper body to remain uncovered.

Jess looked down at her and caught the shadowed outline of her pink nipples against his abdomen, small in their warmth and lightly pressed to his pectoral. He found the image deeply arousing; even the way she subconsciously moved in her sleep—lips twitching, sighing and curling into the warmth of his body—gave the impression of an unintentional seduction.

She exhaled quietly against his skin, making soft noises in her sleep while her hair stretched out behind her like a silken current.

The muscles around her mouth twitched again, giving the impression that she was attempting to hide a smile. "Nice try, Gilmore," Jess whispered, "but you just gave yourself away."

Rory's eyes were quickly visible. She grinned, "I never could tell a lie."

He kissed a sensitive spot on her neck while his arms went around her waist. "Oh, that'll probably change soon." Jess began to move downwards, focusing his attention on her breasts.

Rolling onto her back, Rory asked, "Why's that?"

He nipped at the skin on the outer curve of her left breast, kissing the soft underside. Laughing, Jess cupped her easily in his hands. "Have you forgotten who you're sleeping with?"

Rory arched her back and moaned at the sensation of Jess thumbing her nipples. He smirked, "Guess not."

She squirmed beneath him, trying to apply more direct pressure but finding herself unable to manage it with Jess's hips to the side of her. Rory pushed the covers back with her legs while Jess rested on his forearms, teasing her with gentle nudges against her center. Rory made a sound of protest at his coy advances; he took the hint and switched their positions, steadying her on top of him. She sat up on his waist and shook out her curls, tossing all of her hair to one side as she leaned down to kiss him, her lips hot and parted.

Jess reached between them and slid a finger into her, tracing her wet edges with his thumb. He could feel her bottom against the length of him, "Fuck, Rory," he swore.

Sitting up on her knees, she gave him a few encouraging strokes, touching him with her cool, petal soft fingers. She lightly traced his underside and positioned him against her wet folds. His hands quickly moved to her hips, guiding her down on him. She started a slow decent around the length of him, teasing until she pulled up completely and slid down, her movements faster than before. Jess did nothing to conceal the moan that her actions had caused, opting to thrust up into her while she rocked against him.

Rory was a vision, all porcelain white with faint pink undertones. He tried not to think about her slick warmth surrounding him or the brown, curling hair of her pussy brushing against the base of his dick, her full breasts that fit perfectly into his hands. Jess allowed himself to be fucked, gripping her hips to help her along and giving her the lead. Her movements sped up while he pressed her forward, touching her from behind. She tensed up and held him like a vise, taunt and shaking from the pressure being applied at an unusual angle.

Jess let his climax soak into him quickly. It was like taking his first gulp of air after spending hours submerged in water. His abs clenched painfully as Rory began to ease up, slumping foreword due to the pull of exhaustion on her limbs.

They disconnected, breathing heavily and searching for a restful position. Jess's whole body seemed to sigh contentedly as Rory rested on his chest, her hair tickling his skin.

--

"Jess."

He felt lips on his jaw and cheekbones, fingers trailing his biceps. Rory held the blue sheet over her chest for insulation, leaning over him in the cool winter sunlight.

"What?" Jess asked, pressing his face against her legs beneath the blankets.

She giggled and pulled the covers back, "It's time to get up."

He attempted to coax her down onto the soft mattress. "You lie."

"No way," Rory toyed with his curls, running her fingers through his hair. "I'm a total George Washington."

Jess opened his eyes and moved to kiss her. "So where's your wig?"

She leaned her head back so he could get better access to her neck. "It's on the coat rack by the door. Didn't you see it when you came in?"

He kissed the dip between her breasts. "Nope. I was too busy looking at other things to notice."

She covered his mouth with her own and moved to get out of bed, dragging him along with her.

"It's too early."

"C'mon Swan Boy," Rory replied, "it's never too early for breakfast."

--

"Lets see . . . "

She examined her menu carefully, reading over the list of choices. Jess watched in amused silence, his menu closed, regarding his girlfriend thoughtfully.

"Having trouble?" He asked, leaning into the vinyl booth.

"Nope," Rory downed a large gulp of her coffee, "I picked."

He held her hand on the wiped surface of the table. "You always were decisive."

She blushed a little while he stroked her wrist with the pad of his thumb. The waitress approached their table and they placed their orders, Belgian waffles for Rory and steak and eggs for Jess.

"Carnivore," Rory teased, nursing her mug and taking a generous sip.

Jess smirked, "Hey, you're in no position to lecture me on my eating habits," he joked.

She acknowledged the obvious. "You've got me beat. But do you have to take out the entire barnyard before noon?"

"I repeat my former comment," Jess gave her a look. "Why don't we talk about something that doesn't have any relation to food."

Quick to appease, Rory asked, "What are you doing today?"

"Work till five, maybe a little later. I'm not sure after that."

"I mean, what do you do at work? What's your official job?" She questioned.

Jess gave a faux sigh. "You're such a newspaper girl, I swear." He drank from his coffee.

"You didn't answer my question."

He waited while their food was set before them. Toying with his silverware, Jess answered, "I edit basically everything that Truncheon puts out. Every article and manuscript. I try to meet all our authors before their books are published, meet the artists before we hand up their paintings . . . lots of different things."

Rory swallowed her mouth-full of food. "That actually sounds like the perfect job for you."

Jess arched one of his dark eyebrows. "How do you figure?"

"You do a lot of stuff," she explained. "But it's all things that you like. And there's enough variety so that you won't get bored."

"You know me too well," he said, smiling ruefully.

She fingered her napkin, "Not possible."

Jess watched her across the table. "So, is this the part where you show me yours?"

Rory blushed but her gaze held steady. "What do you want to know?"

He shrugged. "How about you tell me what you do on a typical day."

"Um, ok," she tucked her hair behind her ear. "Well, today I'm going to send an article to Hedges, my editor, and if he gives it his seal of approval he'll send it off to _The New York Post_. This afternoon I've got a phone interview with the Hungarian ambassador for a different article, one for _The Boston Globe_ . . . " Rory trailed off.

Across from her, Jess held his cheek in his left hand while his elbow rested on the table, and easy smile animating his features.

She drank from her coffee, ready to broach her own question. "What are you doing for lunch?"

"I have to meet with this writer from out of town. He lives in Maine so I can't exactly cancel. Want to do something tonight instead?"

"Yeah, that sounds good."

They finished their breakfast some minutes later and paid the bill, leaving hand in hand. After exiting the diner the couple stood in the shadow of the building, kissing. They went unnoticed, most of the people on the streets being partially drowsy commuters.

Jess cupped her face in his hands and held his hips next to hers, covering her lips. They were both startled at the sound of Rory's phone, the ring-tone making her giggle. He reached into her back pocket and handed it to her.

She blushed, unable to conceal the pink tint to her cheeks. "It's my mom, I should probably answer. She's been trying to reach me for a while."

He kissed her quickly. "Answer. I've got to get going anyways. See you later."

Rory kissed him goodbye while fisting the front of his jacket. He caught her lips quickly and left so she could take her call.

Forcing herself to stare straight ahead instead of wistfully watching Jess make his way home, Rory flipped her cell open.

"Hey mom."

"She lives!"

"Is that a hymn or something? It sounds like an Easter carol," Rory contemplated.

"That's right," Lorelai answered, "drop the 'S' and there you go. How are you doing this early morning?"

"Oh, the usual," she teased. "My man just left me on a street corner, but I'll live."

"What?" Her mother laughed.

Rory backtracked. "Jess had to get to work. I'm on my way home as we speak."

"Jess had to get to work, huh," Lorelai responded. "Is that any kind of implication?"

She bit her lip, "Depends."

"I know that tone. You're embarrassed, in fact, you are most likely blushing right now."

"You have no proof of that."

Her mother chuckled. "I'm right, aren't I? I am. Meaning: you had sex with Jess." Lorelai gloried in her triumph.

"I am my mother's daughter," Rory said slyly.

"So?" She asked, "Isn't there anything you want to share?"

"You want me to share the details of my sex life?" The younger Gilmore questioned.

"Nothing terribly intimate, or gory, but I'm actually kind of curious."

Rory bit her lip. "Jeez, mom. What do you want me to tell you?"

Lorelai weighed her words carefully. "Was it what you expected it to be?"

She was caught off guard. Rory thought her mother would want to know if they'd had sex on the kitchen table or in front of an open window, but a part of her remained unsurprised by the caring tone in her mother's voice.

"I don't know. I never really tried to expect anything specific in case we weren't able to sort things out, but I, you know what I'm trying to say," she struggled. Failing to hide her smile, Rory bit the inside of her cheek, "It was wonderful," she finished softly, "it was completely worth it."

--

**A/N:** _Just out of curiosity, what are some things you guys enjoy reading in Pulse? What parts of the story do you like/dislike? Which characters? I'd really like to hear some input. Reviews are always appreciated._


	15. Unethical Persuasion

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _3-31-08_

**Date Finished**: _4-22-08_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_Thanks so much for the reviews for the last chapter. I hope you guys enjoy this one as well because there are a lot of different types of character interaction and I'm interested in hearing some feedback. Reviews are always appreciated._

**Chapter Fifteen: Unethical Persuasion**

She was giggling when he dragged her inside. That kind of coy, non-serious flirting that was only encouraged when Jess's hands found their way up her skirt. She was toying with him, moving backwards until she felt her calves against the couch.

Rory Gilmore wasn't one to fight the obvious. "Jess," her top was off, discarded during the voyage from the door to the sofa, "your phone's wringing."

He was working on a hickey just above her right breast. "Don't care."

She pushed her hair off her neck and dug around in his left pocket for his phone. Brushing a sensitive area, Jess momentarily tensed but eased up when Rory moved the positioning of her hand.

She toyed with his hair, "Not just yet."

Jess chuckled darkly against her skin. "'Not just yet' she says, I'll give you 'not just yet'."

"Aww," Rory held up his phone, showing off the caller ID. "Jess, it's your uncle. You should answer the phone."

Distracted, Jess tried to free her from her skirt while she was still half laying on the zipper. "Rory, if you're going to use a safe word pick something else. That one's a major turn off."

She handed him the phone and he flipped it open. "Hello," he said, waling backwards while Rory pressed on his shoulders, causing him to sit down.

"Well you sound happy to hear from me," Luke deadpanned.

"Couldn't be better," Jess struggled to keep his voice even while Rory slipped off her skirt and climbed into his lap.

"I meant to call you earlier but Lorelai and I didn't get back home until a few days ago. How'd your opening go?"

She began to playfully undo the buttons of his collared shirt, kissing his neck.

"It went well," he turned his head to the side while Rory felt along his chest with her hands and lightly nipped at his ear, "all things considered. No on got shot or seriously offended so I'd chalk it up to a success."

He let Rory slide his shirt off his shoulders while Luke continued to talk. She wore the expression of an explorative teenager, guided by curiosity and instinct. Jess tried to carry on a believable conversation, concentrating on Luke's voice instead of Rory's hot little body on top of his. This became increasingly difficult when she wrapped her legs around his waist, setting her warmth over his belt buckle.

" . . . was wondering if you were coming for Thanksgiving?"

His brain was like an outdated engine, slow and difficult to start. "What?" Jess sputtered, trying to block out the feeling of Rory against his bare chest.

"Jess, Liz really wants you to come. She didn't get to see you that much during the wedding."

The mentioning of his mother's name had an immediate impact on his train of thought. He was quick to realize that he had a family and a life outside of the feeling of Rory's hands on his belt.

"Yeah?"

It was the best response he could muster considering his compromising position.

"Are you listening to a word I'm saying?"

Rory bit the soft shell of his ear whilst giggling into his dark hair. "Right now isn't really a good time," she licked a tense spot on his neck, "can I call you back?"

"I need to know, Thanksgiving or no Thanksgiving—"

He felt her hand begin to creep into his pants. "Ok, jeez. I'll be there. Talk to you later."

Jess closed his phone and abandoned it soon after. "Fuck," he swore, flinging Rory over his shoulder, "are you trying to kill me?"

"Oh my God," she squealed, "this is so Neanderthal, drag-mate-back-to-cave—"

"Yeah, well you totally deserve it."

Rory laughed wickedly but stopped when Jess threw her on the bed.

"Is that a thing of yours? Throwing girls around? I never took you to be so—"

He silenced her by kissing her and laying her flat against the covers, easing up after she tangled her fingers into his hair at the base of his neck, angling to kiss him properly.

Jess flipped them over and let Rory have her fun. "Gilmore, you're crazy."

She unzipped his fly and tugged off his jeans. Adopting an expression that he often wore himself, she cupped his tented boxers in her hand. "I guess that means you like crazy people."

Unhooking her bra, Jess regarded her hungrily. "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger," he quoted.

Rory removed her panties and crawled up to meet him while he shed his boxers. "Good. I'd rather be Suzana Kayson than Sylvia Plath any day."

"Lucky me," Jess purred.

--

She shivered in her sleep; blinking, Rory rolled over on her right side and pulled the bed sheet up so it covered her chest. She rubbed her eyes and noted that Jess's digital alarm clock read ten past one. Her eyes began to adjust to the thick darkness of her boyfriend's bedroom, allowing her to survey the area more closely.

The bed linens were in a state of natural disarray, sheets pooled around limbs and pillows flattened against the leather headboard. Jess's olive complexion blended with the black bed sheets nicely, his course, curling hair shinny and sun-streaked next to the harshly colored linens. He slept on his stomach with his head turned to the side, one of his arms slung loosely around her waist. Rory moved closer to him, seeking comfort in his indiscriminating warmth. Subconsciously, Jess pulled her toward him beneath the covers.

It would be unrealistic to describe Jess as perfect. The idea itself was silly, not to mention girlish in its origins. However, Rory did acknowledge the change in him that had first appeared two years ago, his novel serving as the catalyst for rediscovery. Even then the pressing question of their unlabeled relationship had remained unaddressed. With Jess in a separate state it had been easy for her to compartmentalize; write term paper, call mom, resolve issues with ex-boyfriend. Her college years were a sickening testimony to her innate perfectionist tendencies.

After Yale she had suffered a year of self-imposed solitude, marking it as a paramount gateway to adulthood. She was green to professional journalism but not completely inexperienced. Dedication to her work had given her what she had, an apartment, steady work, and enough money to support herself. Rory had done it all on her own without the help of her grandfather or any of her Huntzburger connections.

She had spent months planning and saving and working relentlessly to prove to everyone that she was an adult and not a spoiled society girl. Nearly three years ago Jess had yelled at her about her life choices while her boyfriend continued to order drinks, apathetic and unresponsive to her realizations. Rory saw it as a fitting conclusion that she would eventually obtain the life she wanted with the person who had steadily reminded her of it.

Pensively, she wondered if she would be in the same place if she hadn't listened to Jess those few years before outside a bar in Hartford. All roads led to no. She assumed that also had to do with Jess and his distinct place in her life. The unnamable, continually wavering presence that he held.

Her hand was opened over the expanse of his pectoral, his chest lightly rising and falling. Rory found the forest green walls of his bedroom oddly relaxing, a stark contrast to the slate gray jungle of New York City. However comforting, the wall color did little to cap the subtle quiet, the absence of urban white noise grating on her nerves and creating a restless desire to sit up in bed or pad around the dark apartment. She slid out of the covers and gently moved her weight from the bed. Rory scooped up Jess's dress shirt and fastened three of the six buttons.

Retreating to the kitchen for a glass of water, she prided herself on remembering which cabinet Jess kept the dishware in. She gulped down the contents of her glass and left the cup in the sink, setting her mind to take a peak into his study.

The ceilings were slanted on both sides, leaving room for heavily stocked bookcases to flank the shortened walls. There were two windows on the left side of the room placed at even intervals, each indentation a miniature alcove. The only evidence of Jess's work lay in the corner where papers and notebooks were scattered over the surface of his roll-top desk. Approaching the area cautiously, Rory noted that Jess's computer, a slim Mac book, was tucked into a deep, half-open drawer. He'd placed stacks of notebooks on the far right corner of his desk; all of them appeared to be full.

Carefully, she reached to lift the battered cover of the notebook at the top of the stack. Rory jumped at the feeling of a hand on her shoulder and yanked her arm away from the desk. "Ah!"

Jess chuckled, "Got you."

"What the hell are you scaring me for?" She held her arms defensively, "I nearly jumped out of my skin!"

"What the hell are you doing wandering around half-naked in the middle of the night?"

Rory made a flustered motion with her hands. "I went to the kitchen for a glass of water," she answered haughtily.

He smirked. "Yeah, and let me guess, you were unwillingly seduced by my books?"

Her blush was obvious even in the dark. "No. That's not true at all."

"Huh," Jess moved closer to her, his underwear slightly crooked while his wiry hair was rumpled and untamed from sleep.

Rory backed up while he advanced, portraying false shyness until she felt the backs of her thighs graze the desk. Her hands moved to grip his waist.

"I wasn't tired."

Jess began to slowly undo the few buttons that she'd bothered with. "Really?"

She moved so that her bare ass clenched against the cold wood, her legs dangling limply off the edge of his desk. The starched fabric fell from her shoulders and gathered at her elbows. "Really," she answered.

His hot palms touched the supple curve of he waist, the smooth line of her bare leg. "I think you should go back to bed."

Rory pushed her long, chestnut hair behind her shoulders, curling her legs around his hips. "Not tired."

Lifting her off the desk, Jess could feel her arousal against the damp fabric of his boxers. "Don't worry," he carried her into the bedroom, his shirt abandoned on the hardwood floor, "you will be."

--

Jess indulged in a bowl of cereal while Rory poured her third cup of coffee. Sipping the cooling liquid, she watched her sluggish boyfriend while he glanced at the newspaper and tossed it aside, bored. Rory abandoned her mug and joined Jess at the table, playing with the cheap newsprint.

Leaning her elbows on the hardwood, she faced him. "Did you mean what you said last night?"

Her round blue eyes were pale and accentuated in the morning light. "Depends," he clinked his spoon on the side of his bowl, "what alleged confession are you referring to?"

She grinned. "Are you really going with me to Stars Hollow for Thanksgiving?"

He stood to pour his excess milk in the sink, leaving the bowl in the dishwasher. "Did I say that? I don't really remember saying that," Jess smirked.

Rory followed him around the kitchen. "Sure you do. We'd just gotten home and you were on the phone with Luke . . ."

"You mean when your hands were down my pants as a means of distraction so you could get Luke to ask me some crazy question that I'd never normally agree to? Yeah, I remember that."

Jess retreated to the bathroom to brush his teeth while Rory trailed after him. "Je-ess," she whined, "I want you to come with me."

"Oh, I'll go with you," he said, busying himself with his toothbrush, "but there are conditions. First, none of that separate bed crap, Luke can learn to transgress his prudishness. Secondly, minimal contact with anyone, acquaintance or relative, that's stayed in a mental institution—"

"Guess you won't be meeting my Great Aunt Sabrina," Rory muttered.

"And thirdly—"

She rolled her eyes.

"—_thirdly_, we keep our relationship to ourselves."

Rory frowned. "You mean you don't want to tell anyone we're dating?"

"Not forever. It'll probably be easier if we keep things quiet for a while. Think about it, do you really want every relative you've ever known to scrutinize your choices in men—or, in my case, women—while you're at a family function?" He arched one of his dark eyebrows questioningly.

"I guess you're right. But my mom will have a problem with this, I can already see it."

"How do you figure?"

"She can't keep secrets. I can't lie. We Gilmores have our weaknesses to think of."

Finished with his teeth, Jess drank a long gulp of water. "Luke's going to want to tell Liz. He might have already, but I doubt it. If she knew she would have called by now."

Rory angled his wrist so she could inspect his watch. "It's seven forty-five."

Leaning against the bathroom counter, Jess said, "I've got to be downstairs in fifteen minutes."

She tugged on his belt-loops, leading him over to the couch, "C'mon."

"Rory," he gave a weak protest.

"Don't complain," she unzipped his fly, "I'm being nice."

"By servicing me?"

Rory bent down, dragging her nails over the skin just above the waistband of his jeans, "Exactly."

--

Lorelai punched a few keys on the Inn's computer, "Thursday, right?"

"Yeah," Rory combed her hair back with her fingers, "just for one night."

"So," the older of the two women saved the reservation she'd just made and flicked through some unopened mail, "how'd you convince Jess to come for Thanksgiving?"

Rory smiled to herself, "I jumped his bones while he was on the phone with Luke."

"Dirty."

"I know," she dug around for a few files in her bag. "Do you think Luke realized . . .?"

"Course not," Lorelai said easily, "Luke sees what he wants to see."

"Or, in this case, hears what he wants to hear."

Lorelai attempted to repress her laughter. "Sorry, I'm just getting this image in my head—"

"Hopefully a non-pornographic image."

"Ah, no guarantees."

"Gross, mom."

"Change of subject," her mother said cheerfully. "What are you doing this lovely Wednesday evening?"

"I'm working on an article for Hedges, and then I thought I'd call Lane. We haven't talked in forever. Things have been so crazy. Oh, did I tell you? Paris is moving to the city."

"Really? I thought she was still in Med School."

Rory opened a file on her computer. "She still is but she's doing this internship thing for a semester at a research center or something. I'm not exactly sure. But I was thinking about asking her to move in with me. I don't know yet. I'm still thinking it over."

"No Jessie boy this evening?"

"The way your mind works defies all logic. But yeah, no Jess tonight. I have to finish this article by tomorrow and Jess has to meet with some writer who's in from Vermont. New York is the second stop in his book tour or something and Jess is trying to work out a deal with his next book. They'll probably be some talk about dollar signs."

"Oddly enough, that sounds like the kind of thing he'd be good at."

Lorelai sorted a large pile of paperwork while Rory rearranged some of the facts in her article. "How's Luke?"

"Oh, you know. Grumpy, covered in plaid, designated handy man or Stars Hollow. Liz has been bugging him lately."

"About that," Rory chewed on the end of her pen, "I talked to Jess and we both agreed that it might be better for everyone involved if we didn't spread around the fact that we're dating. You and Luke already know, but I think we should just keep it on a need-to-know basis."

"But won't that be a tough secret to keep? You guys are staying the night together, won't people just assume that you're involved?"

"Not if they don't find out," Rory answered.

"All right, I'll try to keep it quiet," her mother pledged.

"You wouldn't mind mentioning it to Luke, would you? It'd be a little awkward if I had to do it myself."

"Don't worry, you're covered." Lorelai held the phone away for a moment. "Hey sweets, I've got to run but if anything confession-worthy happens, let me know."

"Will do."

"Bye, love you."

"Love you too, mom."

--

"Get me another shot."

Jess gave Nick a funny look over his glass of Makers Mark.

"Hitting it there, Nicky?" He joked.

"Hey," Nick defended, "we just signed our first contract."

Drinking deeply, Jess answered, "We've got other contracts."

"Yeah, but this is our first 'official' contract with a writer that's been previously published," he added.

Leslie Francon had made the deal over dinner with Jess and Nick. In the past few years he'd been overexposed so signing with a smaller, alternative publishing house would work to his advantage. Jess hadn't been all that concerned with Francon's own attempts at making himself appear more literary. He'd been a commercial success, the kind of money back guarantee that Truncheon Publishing needed to propel its finances, and it's image.

Jess had read Francon's new novel before its release date. The book itself had a less than boring plot and semi-developed characters. Normally it wouldn't have been the type of writing that Jess was interested in, but Francon had potential. He would take work to become what Truncheon Publishing represented, to reach his creative potential, to put out a novel that Jess would find satisfactory. All of these things stood clearly and honestly before Jess while he drained the contents of his glass.

"So tell me," Nick said cheerfully, "is this Francon guy any good?"

Jess choked down a laugh. "At this moment I'm incredibly glad that work in the Art Department."

Within the hierarchy of Truncheon Publishing Nick supervised all artwork that was put out by the publishing house. The layout for the magazine, book covers, author photographs, photo essays, wall space for local artists, gallery openings—it all fell under Nick's jurisdiction.

"He'll take some time," Jess admitted, "but I'll turn him into something good."

"Good man," Nick toasted.

Jess declined a refill. "You still don't want to go to Boston with me and Mathew in December?"

Nick shook his head, disorganizing his blonde waves. "Nah, it's not really my thing. Go with Matt. Drink wine and make pals with his mom like you did last time."

Jess's former coworker Mathew had grown up in Boston in a traditional Irish-Catholic family setting. He'd been to the Living Writers Conference with Mathew only once before.

"I don't think I'll be paying the O'Brien's any visits."

"That's right," Nick nodded, "they probably don't want to see you either. You know, with you deflowering their only daughter when she was barely legal and everything."

"I can see where that'd be a turn-off," Jess said mildly.

"Have you talked with Evan at all since you got together with Rory?"

"Not really. I left a message on her answering machine about two weeks ago just to make it official."

Nick's eyebrows were knitted together, "That's harsh."

Jess shrugged, "It's not like I was the love of her life or anything."

"Still, she's only nineteen, and she did really like you." Nick's argument was less than weak.

"And, in time, she'll really like someone else."

"You guys were together for a year, right?" He asked.

Jess swirled the ice cubes around in his glass. "Approximately," he replied.

"I'm surprised that Mathew wasn't annoyed with the whole Evan situation," Nick mused, staring into space.

"Oh? And what would he do? Bore me to death with some of his early poetry?" Jess chuckled.

"He could beat you up at a stoplight," he offered.

"Poets don't fight, they suffer."

"Hypocrite."

Jess shot Nick a warning glance, "Are we done debating my personal life?"

Their conversation ceased, both men thinking about what the other was to reserved to say.

"You like Evan, don't you?"

Nick said nothing; Jess sighed.

"Why didn't you mention it?" He questioned, "In all the of the times we talked about this kind of stuff you could have said something."

"Look, man," Nick started, "I don't want your seconds."

"Don't be stupid. This is why you've been so miserable these past few months. You're jealous, admit it."

"I guess," he huffed.

A slow, knowing smirk began to animate Jess's features. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," he said politely.

"She was yours first," Nick mumbled.

"Yeah," Jess threw his arm around Nick's shoulder good-naturedly, "but she was Mathew's sister before she was my 'girlfriend'," he made air quotes.

"Talk about making the rounds," Nick chuckled.

--

Checking the caller ID, Lorelai thought twice before answering the phone.

"Hello?" She politely greeted.

"Oh Lorelai, good, you're in," Emily voiced excitedly.

"Hey mom, how are you?" Lorelai attempted to keep her voice down while she quietly padded past April's bedroom door, trying not to disturb her while she prepared for her AP Chemistry midterm.

"I'm very well, thanks. I was actually calling to tell you that Richard and I will be able to come for Thanksgiving."

"Great," she moved to check off her parents' names on a list of invited guests. "We're going to have so many people coming in, I don't know where we're going to put everyone."

"That's right. You're a married woman now, you have twice the family to think of."

"Yeah. So we've got you and dad, me and Luke, April, Liz, T.J., Doula, Sookie and Jackson, and I _think_ Kirk and Lulu are coming, I'm not really sure. Oh, and Rory. Luke managed to convince his nephew to come, so Jess will be there too."

"That's quite a crowd," Emily commented, impressed.

"I know," Lorelai answered tiredly, "and we'll still have our regular guests so I'm up to my eyeballs in plans and order forms and place settings."

Emily glanced loftily at her fingernails, making a mental note to find a more prestigious salon. "It's wonderful to hear that Rory's coming. Richard didn't think she'd make it down because of her work. Do you think she'll be bringing anyone with her?"

"Nah, I don't think so," Lorelai said quickly.

"Are you sure? Do you know if she's been on any dates lately? It's been such a long time since she was with Logan. You don't think she's still upset over him, do you?"

"No, mom. I'm pretty sure that Rory's found someone, but I don't know any of the details. She's being very secretive," she lied.

"Really? Well tell me as soon as you find out. I'm always the last to know these things." A pause, "Are you sure she hasn't said anything?"

"Positive."

"Alright. I've got to run and tell Richard. We'll see you Thursday."

"Bye mom."

--

**A/N:** _Believe it or not, the next chapter isn't even about Thanksgiving. Hope you guys liked this. Remember to review._


	16. Sharps and Flats

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _4-30-08_

**Date Finished**: _5-11-08_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_This chapter will probably remind you guys of chapter four, meaning it's not a part of the linear story; the majority of it's in the past. It will most likely answer a lot of questions that have been raised, so, enjoy._

**Chapter Sixteen: Sharps and Flats**

The phone rang. Jess picked it up a few seconds before it went to voicemail.

"Hello?" He capped the pen he'd been using to mark out large segments of a manuscript. It was ten past two, an hour that he usually found quiet and productive. His bookkeeper Annie had gone to lunch twenty minutes ago.

"Hey Jess, it's Nick. I'm checking out that guy on Hillsborough Street, he's got some really good stuff. How much wall space do we have left?"

Nick had been out all day hitting the pavement in an attempt to sign deals with local artists before the show that Truncheon was having at the beginning of December.

"Plenty. But that hinges on how many paintings you want from this guy."

Nick was grateful that Jess couldn't see his sheepish expression. "All of them."

Jess chuckled. "Don't sign anything just yet. Give him your card, tell him to come by and check things out. I want to meet him before you wipe out his entire collection. What'd you say his name was?"

"Blake. Jonathan Blake."

"Right. When are you going to be done? We could do something later. Rory's meeting one of her friends tonight so I'm free."

There was a slight pause. "I've got something planned already."

It wasn't difficult for Jess to pick up on Nick's cautious tone. "Going out with Evan?"

"Yeah," he admitted.

"Cool. We'll do something later. Give Blake my number in case he wants to call."

"Later Jess," Nick rang off.

Raking his hands through his hair, Jess leaned back from his desk, the front two legs of his chair disconnected from the floor.

A little over a week had passed since his discussion with Nick after their meeting with Leslie Francon, a discussion that hadn't stopped riffling across his mind since the words had been spoken. Jess had put a fair amount of careful thought into his split with Evan, his former "girlfriend" and Mathew's younger sister. He hadn't received any messages or phone calls from her so he took her silence at face value, citing their involvement as finished. They had been together casually for a little over a year; their relationship remaining at that level despite Evan's numerous attempts to wrangle Jess into a commitment, something that he had adamantly refused. They had a four-year age difference that Jess was poignantly aware of.

As was the case with most of his girlfriends, he had met Evan unexpectedly.

In June of his second year at Truncheon Mathew had dragged Jess to Boston, his hometown, for the bi-annual Living Writers Conference. Jess hadn't planned on going. He'd been working on a series of articles on the Philadelphia music scene, pieces that had received an undeniably enthusiastic response. Since early spring of that year his productivity had increased rapidly, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Mathew, who was privately concerned but respectfully silent due to the terrific business that his friend had brought in.

Jess had never been to a conference before. He hadn't made it to the one held in December because Truncheon had been hosting an event of it's own, but by the time June rolled around Mathew had been eager to leave Philadelphia to make a visit to Boston, the town where he'd spent the majority of his life.

Their first night at the Conference had been more about booze and networking than anything in relation to writing. It became increasingly difficult for Jess to think about anything terribly serious when he was busy analyzing Allen Ginsburg and drinking wine with Linda Rossi.

Linda was a teacher at an all-girls prep school in New Hampshire. Jess ended up sleeping with her on Friday evening, having her walk back with him to spend the night while Mathew sleepily retreated to his hotel room. Linda Rossi had been a ritual cleansing, a brief reintroduction to women after one of his self-induced dry spells.

Mathew reframed from commenting on Jess's night with Linda, unwilling to spoil his friend's readopted complacency. They exchanged a few hushed, amiable lines of dialogue during the introduction to one of the speakers, but neither touched on Linda Rossi or the reasoning for her presence in Jess's life.

They listened to a variety of lectures ranging from publishing distribution and advertising to rhetoric; Jess and Mathew found most of the speakers relevant and well spoken, not the bar-room tirades they had grown accustomed to in Philadelphia from "writers" who scribbled poems on napkins and wrote stories on used pizza boxes.

The closing speaker of the evening was doing a lecture on Writing and Technology, a subject that both men had already become agonizingly familiar with during their work for Truncheon's magazine. Jess and Mathew decided to start the night earlier than planned as opposed to sitting through a dull presentation intended for the over-forty crowd that still hadn't unlocked the mysteries of Microsoft Word and Final Draft.

After a quick change of attire and some inconsequential grooming on Jess's end, the pair decided to drive around the inner city until inspiration struck. Jess turned the key in his '68 Dodge Charger while Mathew fiddled with the radio, scanning for one of his favorite stations from his high school years.

"So where are we off to, Matty?"

"You don't mind swinging by my folks place, do you? I promised my sister I'd visit while I was in town." He gave up on the radio and settled for one of the many obscure punk CD's that Jess kept in his glove compartment.

"Sounds fine. It's not like we've got anything else to do."

Mathew grinned. "I see how highly you regard Boston."

Jess shrugged. "There are better cities. I mean, unless you're into beans, or creamed pie . . . "

"Or Catholics," Mathew offered.

"Yeah, about that," Jess asked, "your family's not supper religious or anything, are they? 'Cause if they are I can totally fake it. I went to Catholic elementary school. I'm serious," he continued, "they never have to know about my atheistic, baby-eating ways."

Mathew paid great attention to the scenery outside his window while wearing a frazzled expression.

"Right," Jess drummed his fingers against the steering wheel to the tune of "A Song For The Optimists."

"They don't know I'm gay."

"_What?_"

"My parents don't," he explained, "but my sister, Evan, she's known for years. I never could break it to good old mom and pop that their only son was into dudes."

Mathew said it all with an air of dry sarcasm; Jess gave his friend a pointed look.

"I can't even imagine," he started, "Well, yeah, I guess I can. I don't tell my parents anything either."

"I know you don't."

"My mother didn't find out that I'd moved to a different state until I sent her something in the mail," Jess said thoughtfully.

Mathew chuckled. "Now _that_ is something I can't imagine."

After a few driving instructions from Mathew, they turned onto a well-kept residential street with quaint, turn-of-the-century houses shaded by friendly oak trees. They sky was colored a dusky shade of violet, twilight hidden behind wide, green leaves. The wooden porch railing had been freshly painted; the potted plants on the front steps meticulously cared for.

Mathew's mother was quick to answer the door after a ring and a rapt knock, her expression cheerfully surprised at the sight of her only son. Mrs. O'Brien invited both men into the house, offering fresh tea and lemon squares. After being introduced to Jess she insisted that they both stay for dinner, an offer that Mathew quickly accepted. After a few moments of carefully surveying the two together, Jess picked up on the resemblance between mother and son, noting that they both had the same springy, light brown hair and freckled cheeks.

"Where's Evan?" Mathew asked.

"She's upstairs, I'll go get her."

After his mother was out of earshot, Mathew spoke again. "Looks like my dad's at the station tonight."

"What's he do?" Jess asked.

"He's a fireman," he admitted sheepishly, avoiding his friend's gaze.

Jess capped his smirk and turned at the sound of someone thundering down the stairs. A pair of legs emerged, closely followed by the form of a young woman. Jess was immediately struck by how dissimilar she looked when compared to Mathew. Evan's hair had a distinct, strawberry blonde color to it; where Mathew was full of kinks and wrinkles, Evan was smooth and flawless. She reminded him of a peach, soft and easily bruised.

Dinner was quick but slightly formal. Mathew talked with his characteristic exuberance, brandishing his fork while he spoke and taking speedy gulps of tea between sentences. Jess contributed to the dinner-talk with surprising ease, showing polite interest in the conversation.

He caught himself observing Evan frequently during the course of dinner. She had skinny, matchstick wrists and spider-like fingers; her hands could have belonged to another person. They were thin and quick, smooth like satin gloves. Mrs. O'Brien explained that Evan was a pianist and that she would be going to school in Pittsburgh in the fall to study music at Carnegie Mellon.

Mathew moved through dinner briskly, treating the occasion like it was a chore to be taken care of. It became apparent that he was more concerned with his family's acceptance of Jess than with the process of visiting and catching up. After dinner Mrs. O'Brien pulled Mathew into a discussion on John Keats, leaving Jess and Evan in the kitchen.

She was washing the few dishes that Mrs. O'Brien had used for dinner; looking around, Jess noted that they had few appliances.

"Here," he picked up a towel and began to help her dry.

"Oh, you don't have to," Evan attested.

"It's ok, Mathew's a bit absorbed at the moment." They both paused, listening. Mathew and Mrs. O'Brien could be heard in the other room heatedly debating the opening line of a stanza.

They worked in pleasant, easy silence; Evan washed with the skill of a seasoned laborer. Jess kept up with her pace by exerting a slight effort, getting flashes of memory from when he was seventeen working for Luke.

"So," Evan rinsed off some soapsuds, "How do you really know my brother?"

Jess stacked the dishes neatly on the counter. "We're friends. I met Mathew right after I moved to Philadelphia."

She nodded. He could tell that she was biting her cheek, wondering, unsure of something.

Evan let the sink drain while she dried her twiggy, porcelain hands. "You can tell me, you know," she didn't look up from her task. "About you and Mathew, I'm seventeen, I'm almost an adult, I promise I won't slip anything to dad about—"

Jess was thoroughly confused. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't be so coy. I understand if he told you no to talk about his—I know that Mathew's gay and I just thought that you two . . ." Evan broke off when she caught sight of the humor in Jess's expression. She blushed deeply.

He reached over to turn off the water that had been left running and handed her one of the faded hand-towels left on the counter-top.

"Thanks," she mumbled.

"Evan," he addressed her clearly without any tone of mockery. "Mathew and I are friends. Really. That's all."

"Oh," her pink mouth was full, her lower lip held between her teeth. When Jess looked at her he was struck by the womanly undertones to her youth. "Are you . . . ?"

He shook his head. "No."

"I guess I shouldn't have assumed."

Jess chuckled, enjoying the blush animating her cheeks.

--

Summer in Philadelphia was a unique experience for Jess. Shortly after the conference in Boston one of his short stories had a successful run in _The New Yorker_. Some weeks later he did an article for the Alternative Press on the Warped Tour lineup, all the while managing to evade any serious commitments with Linda, something that had taken a bit of careful phrasing on his part.

Shouldering open the door to the apartment he shared with Chris and Mathew, Jess closed it with his foot, shaking rain drops out of his eyes. The brief summer shower had made watercolors over the windows, blurring the glass with steam and distortion.

Jess made a beeline for the kitchen, storing the milk in the refrigerator before trashing the brown paper grocery bag. He crossed the living room, intent on changing out of his damp clothes, but froze—mid step—at the sight of a pair of legs dangling off the edge of the couch. Jess pushed his hair out of his face and peered over the sofa.

Evan was dozing quietly, dressed in simple cotton and denim with her silken, oval face pressed into the pillows. Silently retreating to his bedroom, Jess paused in the doorway between the living room and the hall, giving Evan an uninterrupted once-over. The muscles around her mouth twitched a little and she sighed, sleepy and doll-like.

_Thank you, Mathew_, he turned to the last door on the right-hand side of the hall, slipping into his bedroom, _thank you, thank you, thank you._

--

It was a hot summer.

Jess wrote obsessively, penning witty, twenty-page stories that ran in separate literary magazines. He was working on a collection, trying to finish up his eighth story so it would finish up around the length of a novel. Jess would write late into the evening, a sliver of light shinning beneath the bottom edge of his door. Sometimes Evan would nock and ease inside his room, depositing a plate of food on his desk, often times flopping onto his bed with a paperback while he worked.

Mathew had invited Evan to stay until she went off to school; it was her subtle way of escaping her parents. Mr. O'Brien had pulled the plug on her dreams of being a pianist after she'd been offered a full scholarship to Penn State. She was unable to see any alternative to her parents' decision, a fact that wore on her mind heavily during her stay with Mathew, Chris, and Jess.

Evan's attachment to Jess started out innocently enough. She had an eclectic taste in music that he found refreshingly compelling. Jess quickly found that she was more knowledgeable about the interworking sounds of instruments and musical theory than himself. She would spread out her books of sheet music and explain the difference between melodic and harmonic minor, the patterns that pianists used to find sharps and flats, and the difficulty for vocal students when they had to sing a solid middle C.

Her eighteenth birthday came and went without much of a fuss. Mathew made a disastrous attempt at a birthday cake while Jess rewarded Evan with tickets to see one of her favorite pianists at the Churchin Center. Her relationship with Jess had grown closer over the duration of the summer months; Mathew took little notice of the matter, seemingly unaffected by the surprising connection between his younger sister and his best friend.

After nearly a month of watching Evan from a safe, platonic distance Jess assumed that he was in the clear. She had one week left with Mathew until orientation and college preparations at Penn and Jess prided himself on the fact that he'd managed to keep her at a distance, friendly but not overly so. In Evan's eyes he had attempted to remain aloof, a slight question mark, something that could eventually become promising. She was young and Jess was consciously aware of that fact.

On one of the last nights before her departure Evan slipped into his room, or more clearly, his series of rooms. Jess had a large area of space at his disposal that had formally been an attic, an area of the old boarding house that had been renovated in the last thirty or so years to form living quarters. It was mostly a large, open area where Jess had arranged his possessions to create a separation between his workspace and his bedroom.

He was seated at his desk with a variety of notebooks and papers spread out in front of him, Evan peering over his shoulder while he typed with speedy accuracy on his laptop. His neat, little Mac Book was crammed with saved documents and text files and articles that he was partially finished with.

Jess finished typing and closed the file. "Hey."

She wore a simple white T-shirt, a sleep garment that was thin and downy soft like layered translucent tissue.

"You work too much," Evan stood while he turned to face her, maneuvering easily in his desk chair.

"Soon this'll be you," he joked, playing with the strings of fabric that clung to her cut-offs. "You'll have papers up to your eyeballs."

Jess's hand lingered on her thigh, drowsiness catching up with him. A small part of her leaned into his palm, her skin buzzing. Evan could see that he was tired, his brown eyes were slightly dilated in the dim light.

Her bare knee brushed against his jeans. "Such is the life of a college student."

She touched his cheek, his hair. Jess didn't pull away from her; as a rule he didn't claim things that weren't at least offered, and in her own shy, introverted way Evan was offering. His hand moved from her thigh to her waist. Both their bodies shifted—an amiable exchange—while she settled into his lap.

Jess gave her a straight, no-frills look when she put her arms around his neck. "Evan," his tone was warning, he spoke with an implication, as if to say: _if you must._

He held her face in his hands, his expression akin to an appraisal of a painting. Her strawberry blonde hair fell a little past her shoulders, slightly longer than when they'd first met. Evan's willing submission made their age difference appear almost comically stark. Jess ran the pad of his thumb over her cheek.

"You're still a kid," he didn't evade from her cool gray eyes, his expression honest.

"But not," she corrected. Jess could tell that if he denied her—if he refused to give her what she was seeking—it would sting for months, perhaps years, afterward.

"You've done this before?"

Evan looked down, afraid to say the wrong thing but also reluctant to deceive him. "No."

He looked at her shrewdly. "If I had a nickel for every time a girl said that."

"I'm not lying."

Jess peered up at her, knowing, accepting. "I know. And that's why you're such a miserable girl."

Her voice was small. "I want you to touch me," she was unable to look him in the eye, "not like I'm a child or Mathew's sister or someone you feel like you have to take care of. I want to be like all your other girls."

He regarded her thoughtfully. "As you wish."

--

They went to bed together.

Jess quickly found that Evan hadn't been lying when she confessed that she was a "good girl." His assumptions about her character were altered the further they progressed. Upon first inspection Jess had written her off as naïve and innocent, but as clothes were removed and decorum abandoned he gathered that she was just painfully inexperienced. They were both openly aware of the difference.

He smoked afterwards. Evan curled up beneath the thin sheet, covering herself modestly while he leaned against the headboard. Jess watched her for a while, hoping that she wouldn't go to pieces the way some girls did after their first time. He had never known Evan to be weepy so he wasn't terribly concerned.

She rested on her side, her silver eyes like coins. "There's more to this, isn't there?"

Jess appraised her calmly. "Of course," he answered.

"I want you to show me," her voice was far off, distant.

"Excuse me?"

She sat up in bed while he slipped an arm around her. "I want to know what you know about sex."

He smirked and kissed her neck. "Show, don't tell," Jess pulled the sheet away from her body, "writers swear by it," he whispered.

--

They saw each other frequently. Evan would be busy attending classes while Jess was at work, giving them time to meet up after all of the day's requirements were taken care of. Jess and Evan never established themselves as a couple; in the infancy of their relationship she pressed few issues. Evan didn't want to become a nuisance to him or to Mathew, so she stayed quiet about a label for their involvement.

A week into being together Jess caught her watching him while he worked, dreamy eyes and all. He looked at her very seriously and told her not to fall in love with him. She made no sound or answer.

--

The fall and winter months went by quickly. Jess started the first draft of his second novel while Evan grew continually discontent with her time at Penn. She missed her mother and her music and it had only just begun to sink in that her father had prevented her from becoming a pianist. As a matter of protest she stayed in Philadelphia for Christmas instead of going back to Boston. Mathew made numerous calls to his mother in an attempt to explain the situation. Evan regretted harming her mother's feelings but she stuck to her decision all throughout the holidays.

On Christmas morning Jess made love to her for hours. He felt guilty for being with her when she obviously belonged at home, but he felt even worse when Mathew leaked to him that Evan only looked happy when she was around him.

It poured snow that December and—months later—Jess still liked to revisit the memory of Evan asleep in his bed next to a window of pure white illumination.

--

Spring brought heavy talk and eventually finalized plans for the expansion of Truncheon Publishing. Jess would start up a branch in New York and—depending on the outcome—Mathew would follow in Boston.

Evan left college after competing her second semester at Penn State; she saw little point in her wasted year and showed regret at adhering to her parents wishes. She received little solace form Jess on these points. He was then in the heyday of his move from Philadelphia to New York, a change that barely gave him time to write let alone keep up a casual relationship with an academically scorned eighteen-year-old.

They amicably decided to take a break from one another to devote more time to their careers. Evan secured a job with an acting company that required a pianist, traveling for two months before she acquired a steady job in New York. Residential stability came in the form of an agency that rented out musicians for parties and charity events. Both jobs required little from her besides talent and musical variety.

After a few months of separation Jess and Evan had a briefly satisfying reunion, a short-lived attempt at recapturing the early stages of their romance. After a few weeks Jess came to terms with the reality of the situation: that his "involvement" with Evan soon have to end, a decision that was punctuated by the rising prospect of Rory Gilmore.

--

Rory opened the door to Jess's office, her hand fluttering to the light switch but retreating at the sight of her boyfriend's slumbering form. He'd fallen asleep at his desk, the lamp still glowing, with a pen clutched languidly in his hand.

"Jess," she nudged him gently, "wake up."

After a moment or two he blinked and removed his cheek from the cluttered desktop. Rubbing his eyes tiredly, he greeted her, "Hey you."

She fixed his rumpled hair while he leaned his forehead against her stomach. "Tired boy. You should get some rest."

Jess allowed himself to be handled, letting Rory pull him out of his deserted office and upstairs to his apartment.

"How'd it go with Paris earlier?"

She waited while he unlocked the door. "She'll be moving in with me for a while, just a semester, I think. Paris is doing work at this laboratory where they're doing research on gene therapy or something. I'm not exactly sure."

Jess made a sound of agreement; his dilated eyes and weary movements didn't escape Rory's penetrating blue gaze. She kissed him in the hallway just outside his bedroom, slow and soft.

"Jess."

"Yes, Rory?" He held her while his lips grazed a patch of freckles on her neck.

"Lets go to bed."

--

**A/N:** _I know you guys and probably like "WTF? A whole chapter on Jess with another girl?" but in some ways it is very necessary. This chapter goes into detail on the aftermath of the "The Real Paul Anka", which is, I think, very significant to _Pulse_. As always, reviews are greatly appreciated. _


	17. A Lie Thigh Thanksgiving

**Title: **_Pulse_

**Rating:** _R_

**Date Started**: _5-12-08_

**Date Finished**: _5-21-08_

**Summary: **_He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati._

**Disclaimer**_: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine._

**A/N: **_I'm sorry about the delay in updating, especially since the last chapter was a recap of seasons six and seven from Jess's POV. My work this school year is much more demanding and that is the only explanation I can give. As some of you may or may not know, I am sixteen and a junior in high school. I have to do a lot of writing for school because of the classes I'm signed up for—Honors Chemistry, Honors Psychology, Newspaper, Honors English III—so it basically cuts my writing time in half. However, Pulse will be completed within a year. Enjoy the chapter._

**Chapter Seventeen: A Lie Thigh Thanksgiving**

"So you're absolutely positive that you'll be there tomorrow?" Lorelai asked, double-checking.

"Of course," Rory answered, "there's no way I'm missing Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, how many dinners are we attending this year? I need to coordinate my schedule."

"Believe it or not, we're only doing one."

Rory wore a baffled expression, "Why?"

"Well," Lorelai started, "Luke's family is coming, Lane and Zach are swinging by after meeting with the Kims, Mom and Dad have forbade any other engagements so they'll be coming, Kirk and Lulu have finally given us a yes, Sookie and Jackson are bringing Martha and Davey, me, Luke, and April, and you and Jess."

"Wow."

"I know. And all our normal guests will be at the Inn as well and I've opened the invitation to them. There's actually going to be less people than we'd originally planned for. Babette and Morey are visiting family in Syracuse and Mrs. Patty is in Maine with her fifth husband."

Rory sighed tiredly. "Tomorrow will be like descending into a stuffing-filled mod scene."

"It isn't normally? Guess I just didn't notice."

"Funny," she said humorlessly, "I'm just glad that I don't have any work to do over vacation. Hedges decided to spare my remaining brain cells and give me my assignments later."

Pouting, Lorelai said, "It's not polite to boast."

"Sorry."

The older of the two women yawned, lowering the volume on her TV with the remote. "I woke up this morning with my heart beating fast enough to worm its way out of my chest plate. I felt nauseous all day and I keep running into doorframes and chairs. I'll be happy when Thanksgiving is over and I can go back to my normal couch potato status."

"Take some Benadryl. It'll make you nice and sleepy," Rory stretched.

"There's a box on the coffee table as we speak."

"Nice."

Scooting over, Lorelai made room for Paul Anka on the couch. "What's Jess up to this evening?"

"Writing. He wants to have his new book out by early April so that means editing has to start at the beginning of December which means Jess has to finish his book in less than two weeks."

"Sounds marathon-like."

Rory shook the bottle of nail polish she was planning on using. "I tried to get him to eat earlier but he was so enveloped that I doubt he even noticed I was in the room," she began to apply the bright red color to her toes.

"Has he named it yet?" Lorelai asked, curious.

"I'm not sure. Most of the time he just refers to it as his magnum opus."

"I'd laugh at that joke if I didn't feel so tired."

Rory snorted, "So would I."

"Meaning?"

Working on her other foot, she answered, "I had dinner with Paris last night. She was in town for some research thing. Anyways, it looks like she'll be moving in with me for a semester."

Throwing a chew toy to Paul Anka, Lorelai frowned, "That's . . . good?"

"In a way. It means that I only have to pay for half the rent, and it's not like I'm there all the time."

"I see what you mean. Have you told Jess?"

"Yes," Rory said darkly, "he laughed at me."

Snickering, Lorelai cleared her throat after a few moments of annoyed silence on Rory's end of the phone. Wearing a thoughtful expression, she asked, "How do you think it will go with having Jess and Paris," she struggled to find the right word, "interact?"

Rory shrugged. "In the past they've gotten along fine. Paris hated Logan and it was never a huge issue."

"If you say so."

Changing he subject, Rory asked, "How's April?"

"Fine. She's a girl genius. Puts your reputation to shame."

"I mean, how is she with the whole having a stepmother thing?"

"Surprisingly, things have gone smoothly. I was worried at first because I didn't want to turn into that hideous stepmother from Cinderella."

"Are you implying that I'd be one of the ugly stepsisters?" Rory asked dryly.

"Yes. You and my other illegitimate children."

"And who would you suggest to be the Prince?"

"Jess."

"They're cousins."

"You and Jess are cousins."

"Not the same thing," Rory dismissed.

"He's the only young male I have access to," Lorelai explained.

"Access? To get access you'll have to check with his magnum opus first," Rory chided, screwing the cap back on her nail polish.

--

Jess woke to the feeling of sheets being lightly tugged off his body.

"Good morning," Rory said cheerfully.

He covered his head with the pillow, burying himself deeper in the bed linens.

"Jess," she traced his ribs, smiling maliciously when it made him tense with laughter.

"Stop it," he attempted to tell her off.

"No way," Rory replied indignantly.

"Woman, this is what you wake me up for—"

"I woke you up because it's Thanksgiving and you promised that you'd go with me if I agreed to your terms and conditions—and I did—"

He covered her jabbering mouth. Calmly, Jess spoke. "I'm going to get dressed, and they we'll leave, alright?"

She nodded, her crystal blue eyes wide in the morning sunlight.

"Good girl," he teased, abandoning her on the bed in search of suitable clothes.

--

Casting a smirk in Rory's direction, Jess turned the radio down to a low murmur. "Look who's tired now."

They'd been driving for some time and the monotonous, soothing rhythm of the car's engine had put Rory to sleep. She yawned and stretched while Jess turned the radio off altogether, attempting to keep his eyes on the road.

"Sorry," Rory blushed, fixing her hair, "I had to recharge."

"We'll be there in about," he drummed his long fingers on the steering wheel, "ten minutes."

She frowned, checking the clock. "It's only ten-thirty."

"That it is," Jess said.

"I thought there'd be more traffic."

"I used some evasive driving maneuvers."

She fixed him with a shrewd stare. "Who were you trying to evade?"

"No one, sweetheart."

"You lie."

Jess ran his fingers through his hair, "Go back to sleep, Gilmore."

She adjusted her turquoise sweater, "I'm not tired."

"Good," he said, pulling into a parking spot and leaving the heat on.

There was a light dusting of snow on the tree branches and the pavement. "Oh look," Jess's sarcasm was obvious, "we're early."

Rory noted that there weren't any other cars parked within her visual range. A mixture of sleet and ice made her mother's Inn look like a gingerbread house perched just up the walk. She undid her seatbelt and reached over to Jess's side of the car, doing the same.

She bit her lip, trying to hide her grin. "You planned this."

His fingers brushed the top of her hand. "I don't know what you're talking about," Jess said, tracing the pad of his thumb over her wrist.

"Getting up late and letting me fall asleep . . ."

"C'mon Rory, you know I never plan anything," he smirked.

She climbed over the center console and into his lap, "You're a bad liar."

With a window of time at her disposal Rory thought lightly of the secret she would be hiding throughout the rest of the day. She began to kiss Jess's neck affectionately.

He stoked her hip through the thick tweed fabric of her new skirt. Its hold around her was loose, making it easy for Jess to inch it up slightly to expose her pale thighs. His hands were warm against her chilled skin.

"Think it'll be hard?"

"What?"

Her eyes fluttered open, her lashes long and painted, stemming from the smooth lilac skin there. He unbuttoned her sweater.

"Not telling anymore."

The heat of her sex was pressed against the seam of his pants; Rory pressed herself down onto his black jeans. She tried to hold her hands steady while she undid the buttons on his shirt.

He kissed her eyelids and the soft underside of her neck, feeling his way beneath her shirt, touching her where she was wet like a slick bathroom tile. When Rory started on his belt buckle he cupped her face and covered her mouth, tasting her.

Jess tugged her turquoise sweater off her shoulders, tracing the lines of her torso and the youthful curve of her breasts. "Back seat."

Rory's body was draped over his, both of them mindful of their limbs and limited space. Jess moved his hands to her hips, patient and steady while she worked on the zipper of his jeans. Normally he liked to watch their bodies moving while they were having sex but her tweed skirt obscured the mechanics of it, causing the feeling of her around him to amplify. The image strung him back to some abandoned schoolboy fantasy about Catholic girls and virginity while the windows of his '68 Dodge Charger fogged against the November chill.

--

They arrived perfectly on time.

Walking in with their bodies disconnected, eyes anywhere but each other, Jess gave her a look as if to say _you know_ before departing from Rory's company, moving with no distinct purpose in mind but lightly toying with the idea of seeing his mother.

Luke greeted him in the kitchen. "Help me with these knives."

He dolled out handful of cutlery. "Hey to you too," Jess smirked, complying with his uncles directions.

Lorelai had already sucked Rory into a void of endless chatter, a mug of coffee clutched in her hand while she tried to catch her daughter up to speed. "That won't stop any time soon, will it?"

"Probably not," Luke answered.

Luke and Jess were the only ones in the dinning room. Sookie had already established full reign in the kitchen while Lorelai directed guests and made flower arrangements. Jess set the silverware while Luke meticulously folded the expensive linen napkins.

"Liz has asked about you twice already."

"What?"

"This morning. She stopped by to get a recipe for this pie she's making and I may have mentioned—"

"I knew it."

"—that you were in a serious relationship."

Jess shot his uncle a dark look.

"You _are_ in a serious relationship, right?"

"I'm going to put you in a serious relationship with this carving knife if you blab anymore," Jess brandished the utensil threateningly for effect.

"Give me that," Luke snatched it away from his nephew. Jess finished up with the silverware while the older of the two men continued to talk. "Why is this such a big deal in the first place?" He made a questioning gesture with his arms, still holding the carving knife. "You're going to have to face Rory's family eventually. Don't say I didn't give your fair warning. The Gilmore's are inescapable."

"I understand all of this," Jess interjected. "I'm not trying to avoid anything. Think about this logically," he carefully removed the knife from Luke's grasp and placed it on the sideboard, well out of his uncle's reach. "If you had been with someone, say, three weeks or so and you were happy with the way things were progressing and there weren't any glaring, major issues you had to address you still probably wouldn't ask your significant other to meet your entire—slightly medicated—extended family, right?"

Luke frowned, seeing Jess's point.

"Dearest uncle Luke," he said mockingly, clasping him on the shoulder, "allow me to be selfish for just a few more weeks."

He adopted a surly expression. "You can't avoid this forever."

His nephew laughed slightly. "Since when have you ever needed to worry about me?" He joked, "I just don't feel like sharing just yet."

Both men retreated to a less populated portion of the Inn in an attempt to stay out of the holiday-inspired minefield. Jess flicked through a paperback that he'd left in his coat pocket while Luke read the newspaper. Through the opening of a doorway Jess spied Rory carrying out errands for her mother, straightening and organizing and answering the phone. She spotted him in the sitting room, indulging in a collection of short stories by O'Henry, and sent him an exasperated look, as if to say: _not fare_.

More guests began to show up the closer it grew to one o'clock. Liz arrived thirty minutes early sporting her three-year-old daughter, T. J., and a frazzled-looking April who sought refuge in Jess's company shortly after her arrival.

"How's it going, kid." Jess stuffed his book into his back pocket while April joined him on the floral sofa that he was currently occupying.

"How did you make it out of that?" She signaled to Liz and company.

Jess observed the makeshift family unit thoughtfully. "It was minus two back then. Not always, though. T. J.'s husband number four, but he has managed to last the longest, so I'd say it's an improvement."

She gaped a little but righted herself when Jess reached over to the nearby bookshelf and handed her a copy of _A Brief History of Time._ They read in compatible silence.

--

Lane plopped down next to Rory, pushing aside a stray cushion on the bench seat in Lorelai's office. They were supposed to be making a few last minute arrangements in the kitchen but Sookie had banished them after one too many hazardous lemon incidents. The childhood friends had decided to take the time to catch up instead.

Rory listened attentively while Lane gushed about her last bout of touring, which had ended only a week-and-a-half ago. Because of Lane's unpredictable schedule and Rory's move to New York they'd had little time to talk about the directions their lives had taken. Lane's band had finally begun to pick up a following; they'd recently been able to record a live album and distribute it at shows.

After some twenty minutes of music talk they started on Rory and her new job. It was then that Lane touched on what Rory knew had been eating away at her since she'd arrived.

"I don't know if you saw earlier, but Jess is here," she said carefully. "I didn't know if you'd want me to tell you because it probably isn't a big deal because you guys haven't seen each other in years—"

"Lane," Rory interrupted, "remember in the third grade when we promised that we'd tell each other everything?"

"Yes. It was the highlight of the first eight years of my life."

Rory got up quickly and shut the door to the office. "Well, now is one of those times."

--

"Oh my God!"

"Shh," Rory said harshly, "people will hear you."

"Sorry," Lane admitted quickly. She attempted to compose herself but failed miserably when Rory dissolved into a fit of muffled laughter.

"But that's _so_ romantic," Lane said excitedly.

"In a way, yeah," Rory answered shyly. "But none of it was planned. I mean, we've only been together for like, three weeks."

"So," the bouncy Korean woman asked, "how is it?"

Rory blushed a delicate shade of scarlet. "You mean—"

"Yes, 'it.'"

"Lane! You're married."

"I'm living vicariously through you. Details, please."

She sighed, trying to appear serious. "Since you so desperately want to know . . . "

--

Rory poked at the soft, pale green substance on her plate. "What is that?" She whispered.

Jess shot her a funny look while the dinning party carried on, oblivious to their conversation. "It's jell-o salad."

The table was fully seated and everyone had recently started on their meals. Rory's full plate contained an assortment of dishes.

"What's jell-o salad?"

Jess buttered a wheat roll. "It's just green jell-o mixed with cool whip and pineapples," he shrugged. "It tastes pretty good. You should try it."

She speared some turkey with her fork, her face bearing skepticism. "If you say so."

"I do."

"Ok then."

"It's good to step out of your comfort zone sometimes," he added.

"This is true."

Jess stared at her while she put gravy on her mashed potatoes. "What?" Rory asked.

"Nothing," he said, squeezing lemon in his tea.

Rory huffed a little and picked up her spoon. "This is for you, jell-o Nazi."

Jess rolled his eyes and continued eating, hiding the look of triumph he wanted to express when Rory went back for seconds.

--

"Liz!" Luke hissed, lecturing his sister, "Don't, just don't."

"Relax, older brother," she peered around the corner of the doorframe, "I'm just watching."

"I wasn't supposed to tell you. If Jess finds out he will castrate me in my sleep."

Liz waved her hand in Luke's direction as if to dismiss his exaggeration. "Just be cool. She's a pretty girl, isn't she?"

"Um, well, I guess. I never really looked all that closely—"

"She looks a lot like Lorelai," Liz observed.

Luke nodded. "They do favor each other."

"And she's a nice girl," Liz said. "I always hoped that Jess would get a nice girl instead of some trashy airhead from Jersey." Her brother snorted while she went on about the young couple.

"Jess and Rory sitting in a tree-"

A voice interrupted her. "F-U-C-K-I-N-G."

Liz jumped a mile high and spun around while Luke laughed, but only slightly.

Jess sent his mother a cool glance. "You always were the guilty one."

She swatted one of his crossed arms. "Don't scare me like that."

"Sorry," he smirked, "I couldn't pass up the opportunity."

Luke shook his head. "You seem to be full of laughs today."

"So I've heard from multiple sources. Are you two finished spying yet? Your spouses are beginning to wonder where you slipped off to."

"I wasn't—" Luke started.

"Sure you weren't."

"Jess, c'mon."

"You know, Lorelai is less than twenty feet away."

"Jess."

"And while you guys were spying on my girlfriend I could have been banging your wife in a closet."

"She wouldn't sleep with you," Luke defended.

Jess arched on of his fine, dark eyebrows. "Wouldn't she?"

"Shut up."

He held a knowing look, "I'd go check if I were you."

"I'm not you."

"Yeah, Lorelai saw that too," he chuckled.

Luke shook himself of Jess's words and stalked off.

He turned to his mother. "Not a word to anyone, please."

She laughed. "About you and Rory or you and Lorelai?"

Jess shrugged, smirking, "Both."

--

A drinking glass shattered on the kitchen floor. "Oh, Sookie I'm so sorry," Rory apologized, moving to use the dustpan.

"Aw, that's the third one today," Sookie said mournfully.

Rory began to sweep up the shards. "Here, let me clean this up."

"Why don't you take a break," she suggested, gently taking the broom and dustpan from Rory's hands, "you look tired."

"I want to help."

Rory felt Sookie propel her through the kitchen door like she was a troublesome child that merely got in the way.

She sighed and walked down the hallway, holding her arms self-consciously. It was early in the afternoon and some of the guests had already left but her grandparents and Luke's family had remained. As clumsy as she'd been, Rory wasn't the least bit tired. She felt a little wobbly but that was mostly due to nervousness at getting caught with Jess. They'd shared a few long, questionable looks over the span of a few hours that had hopefully gone undetected.

"Rory."

She spun around, looking. "Jess?" Rory whispered.

"C'mere," she followed the sound of his voice into the library, shutting the door behind her.

--

**A/N:** _Is anymore else looking forward to Heroes tomorrow? I definitely am. Don't forget to review :D_


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